Sony Pictures enjoyed serious link love when Google UK dropped a link to them at the bottom of its search result pages.
The link for the Da Vinci Code game from Sony Pictures and Google led to a dramatic increase in visits to Sony’s website, Hitwise blogger Heather Hopkins posted just how sharp the spike was that Sony experienced.
“Sony Pictures’ website received almost half (47%) of its traffic from Google (combined UK and .com) last week. This is 44% more than average for the Hitwise Entertainment – Movies category,” she wrote, and accompanied that with a graph showing the “hockey stick” growth in visits to Sony after Google added the link.
Hopkins only looked at UK versions of four search engines when considering how Yahoo, MSN, and Ask fared in moving traffic to Sony Pictures as the debut of the Tom Hanks film “The Da Vinci Code” neared. Yahoo matched Google briefly but faded, while MSN and Ask remained relatively flat in the traffic they delivered.
Sony’s game promotion in turn moved players to Google’s personalized homepage, where they could add a module and compete for a grand prize package by solving a series of puzzles leading up to the movie’s release.
For anyone who has not read the book, the movie version debuts on the big screen on May 19th.
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David Utter is a staff writer for Murdok covering technology and business.
