Remember the DaVinci code/Google hookup around Easter? (Nathan has a round up of where things stand with the puzzles, etc. here. He apparently is one of 10,000 folks who completed the 24 puzzles and is in the “finals.”)
Anyway, the folks at Hitwise sent me an analysis of what a link on Google SERPs (along with some juicy homepage promo) will do for a site like Sony Pictures. Check out this graph:
Bam!
Now, sure, DaVinci Code got a lot of PR at the same time, so maybe this is not just Google? They isolated engine traffic too, here’s Google:
More at the Hitwise blog.
The HitWise charts provide fresh evidence of what a top listing in Google will do for a brand or promotion. Recently, one of my clients fell from #9 in Google for “house plans” to #12 and I was able to figure out the cost of that drop to be 100 visits a day. Had the site been on the top of search results it would have generated a lot more traffic and a drop off the first page of results would have also be noticed much more.