In my mind, McDonald’s is a fast food joint; although I might have assumed a website existed, it was of no importance. But traffic to that site has greatly increased in recent days, due (probably) to the annual Monopoly game.
Adam Tornes documented a 234 percent jump in traffic, which is impressive enough. It’s especially unusual, though, since he then wrote, “[T]here was little mention of the Monopoly game at McDonalds.com and the online game was hosted on a separate domain, monopoly.corsis.com.”
Tornes later continued, “In addition to more unique visitors McDonalds.com received a much greater attention share for the month of October; more than double the domain’s normal attention share, meaning during the month of October, visitors to McDonalds.com spent twice as much time as they typically do.”
I’m unsure how McDonalds.com’s visitors spent all that extra time, since there really isn’t much to read or do on the site. Maybe they were just being thorough in checking that Monopoly information wasn’t around. Regardless, Tornes dug into past numbers and found that pretty much all of McDonald’s offline promotions have had a significant impact on traffic to its site.
Not every business can give away expensive cars and tons of cash, but most can probably learn something from this trend.
