Who’s Tops? Bud Light Is Unseated As Number One Super Bowl Advertiser On Google And Bing

It looks like we have an upset. Bud Light appeared to be the clear front runner among Super Bowl advertisers running paid search ads on Google and Bing, It turns out the King of Beer’s less filling counterpart is merely the runner up on both search engines.

Volkswagen has garnered the top spot with the most ad impressions on Google. While Nestle has taken the lead on Bing to promote the new Butterfinger Cups. That’s according to the monitoring service BrandVerity, which began monitoring paid search ads across 27 super bowl-related keywords on January 21.

BrandVerity’s Sam Engel says they’ve been monitoring the Super Bowl keyword set throughout the day to get a proxy of overall ad impressions. While Bud Light ads have appeared to consistently claim the number one position, Volkswagen, which started out of the gate promoting its teaser ad before switching to its full game day spot, has often been the sole advertiser on the SERPs for certain Super Bowl queries. The example below that was spotted today.

On Bing, Toyota has, so far, bested Volkswagen to claim the third spot behind Butterfinger Cups and Bud Light.

Here are how the advertisers currently stack up in PPC:

New Advertisers Jump On SEM In These Final Days

As we head into the final stretch, several new advertisers have entered the PPC ring. T-Mobile is promoting its ad on Bing. The yogurt wars are being fought on Google with both Chobani and Oikos now running ads. Hyundai has joined Toyota, Volkswagen and Audi on both Google and Bing to promote its Super Bowl ads for the Elantra and its higher end sedan, the Genesis.

H&M is asking searchers to vote for David Beckham to appear “#covered or #uncovered” in its Super Bowl Ad. (Can’t imagine which way that vote will go.) The three site links go to David Beckham’s line for men and kids on the H&M site.

Newcastle, capitalizing on its Reddit win was spotted promoting its IfWeMadeIt.com campaign in Google.

Budgets for many of these newbies aren’t adequate enough to sustain campaigns through the day. By mid-afternoon, only a handful of ads continue to show. It’s no wonder. Using Google Keyword Planner as a guide, costs-per-click on these terms are likely well above $5.00.

(Image by Wisecontrarian and used via Creative Commons licensing.)