I run a website that was the first result after clicking on a Google doodle. Here is our traffic spike:<p><a href="http://i.imgur.com/HAyjo.png" rel="nofollow">http://i.imgur.com/HAyjo.png</a><p>It is hard to see from that screenshot, but on an average day we get 5-20k visitors. The day of the doodle we got 142k and sales/revenue spiked like crazy.
As a comparison, the logo for Freddie Mercury's birthday resulted in 1.2M Wikipedia pageviews on the day, and ~500k the day after: <a href="http://stats.grok.se/en/latest/Freddie_Mercury" rel="nofollow">http://stats.grok.se/en/latest/Freddie_Mercury</a><p>Jorge Luis Borges? 2.0M -- but the day after (perhaps this is a time zone thing?)
<a href="http://stats.grok.se/en/latest/Jorge_Luis_Borges" rel="nofollow">http://stats.grok.se/en/latest/Jorge_Luis_Borges</a><p>Those two were global doodles.<p>Goethe, who was given a doodle in Germany, received ~113k:
<a href="http://stats.grok.se/de/201108/Johann_Wolfgang_von_Goethe" rel="nofollow">http://stats.grok.se/de/201108/Johann_Wolfgang_von_Goethe</a><p>I don't have the time to do any more, but if anyone wants to (or can think of a way to automate it), the list of Google Doodles is here: <a href="http://www.google.com/logos/index.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.google.com/logos/index.html</a><p>(I was assuming that Wikipedia was the first result for the person's name in these cases. I also only counted en.wikipedia.org for the global doodles.)<p>EDIT: extra contextual stats from grok.se
This will spark some controversy but I think if it was a wider appealing doodle then it would get more coverage. In my ignorance I would not click it because I do not know what it represents really.<p>I think the stats would have also been better a year ago, I now use the address bar in chrome to do all my searches so I do not see the doodle in it's full glory, I see it in the top left hand corner all small. I don't even look at it any more!<p>A year ago on Firefox I would have clicked it
This remind me about SEO and Spain. Several spanish SEOs thought about this and started building landing pages to target future doodles. And this eventually killed links to search results in doodles in google.es ;) I'm not sure if the limit still aplies after Panda and if other country specific googles have the same regulations.
How much traffic being on a Google doodle gives <i></i><i>to a page that is the first result on the result page that appears if a user clicks on the doodle logo</i><i></i>. I would not have clicked through to any result.
When Google featured Alexander Calder in their logo a page from my blog happened to be the 10th result on the first page of results for the term Alexander Calder.<p>I got over 6000 visits that day. Keep in mind that this was 6000 clicks on the 10th result on the search page. So I believe that the hits for the first two or three results must have been much exponentially higher.
Very interesting.<p>Also interesting is that the blurb on the search result page was truncated before the important information I was looking for could be revealed. I wouldn't have clicked through to the Wikipedia page if the excerpt had ended a few words after "He is credited with discovering ..."
Genuine Question - Why is this topic of any interest at all for Hacker News?<p>This seems more like something SEO marketers or people with nothing to do would be interested in.<p>Q1 Does knowing the amount of traffic a Google Doodle gets in any way help someone become a better hacker?<p>Q2 Does this topic in any way lead to getting better at anything?<p>Or has Hacker News turned into some tech version of LOLCatz?