Jobs Site Reports Super Bowl Boost, and It Wasn't an Advertiser

Jobs.com is thrilled with its post-Super Bowl site traffic numbers.

The online employment site says it saw a 38 percent boost in visitors to the site on Monday, with a total of 90,000 people stopping by.

That wouldn’t be surprising, if jobs.com were one of the three sites in its category that spent millions of dollars for a spot on this year’s Super Bowl. But it didn’t.

The company is apparently benefiting from consumer confusion, an easy-to-remember domain name, and a greater awareness of online job resources in general, after Monster.com, HotJobs.com, and kforce.com ran ads in the big game.

Jobs.com even informally surveyed its visitors and asked which online employment ad they liked best, and found that 26 percent preferred its spot. Interestingly, the jobs.com television ad doesn’t start running until March 6.

“We viewed our competitors’ ads as $10 million of advertising for the online recruitment category,” says Caryn Kboudi, vice president, advertising, for jobs.com.

“By waiting until the week before the big event to launch our campaign, we are able to ride the tide they created by sending job seekers to the net to do a job search.”

Most of the jobs sites that did advertise in the Super Bowl, though, gained more traffic that jobs.com did, though, of course, it cost them.

HotJobs.com showed a 240 percent increase in traffic on Sunday and Monday, and newcomer kforce.com drew in 2,600 percent more, according to Media Metrix. Monster.com, although it had more unique visitors (414,000) than the other jobs sites during that time, only saw a 4.5 percent increase, perhaps because its traffic was already high.