McDonald's Online Promotion, Proven Success For Others to Follow (MCD, WEN, JACK, YUM)

comScore data comes out monthly and it is very frequent where the trends come in almost exactly as you might have guessed when it comes to popular websites and the traffic growth.  Then there are the other months where surprises come out of left field.  McDonald’s Corporation (NYSE: MCD) is not a normal company you would expect to see a major website traffic jump.  It turns out that October 2010 was no ordinary month and McDonald’s nearly doubled its number of internet unique visitors from the month before.

Wendy’s/Arby’s (NYSE: WEN), Jack in the Box Inc. (NASDAQ: JACK), and Yum! Brands, Inc. (NYSE: YUM) all have something to learn here for fast food promotion.  All casual dining restaurants have to learn something as well, but we want to use an apples-to-apples comparison.

The total unique visitors jumped a whopping 91% to 6.51 million uniques in October from 3.413 million in September.  Maybe the first thing that comes to mind is the McRib advertisements all over bringing the 500 calorie and 980 mg sodium sandwich back.

We put a call into comScore to look for more data to see just how much this stood out.  A spokeswoman there looked up the data and it appears to be tied to a huge jump in the subsite called PlayatMCD.com, a Monopoly prize and reward game that appears to have been played by millions.  PlayatMCD.com notes:
This promotion ended November 15, 2010 at 11:59:59 p.m. ET.
This year, we awarded millions of rewards and prizes to tons of winners (all subject to verification) – and had lots of fun doing it!

comScore’s spokeswoman also note that this was the largest figure since May 2010 when there were roughly 9.7 million uniques.  That may have been during other incidents, but a hiring call was noted as the big factor then.

If this data does not act as a lesson to other fast food and casual dining chains which are very active in advertising, then what will?  It was earlier this month that McDonald’s released its same store sales for October, and the gains from October 2009 were as follows: U.S. up 5.6%; Europe up 5.8%; and Asia/Pacific, Middle East and Africa up 5.3%.

Wendy’s/Arby’s (NYSE: WEN), Jack in the Box Inc. (NASDAQ: JACK), and Yum! Brands, Inc. (NYSE: YUM) all likely noted the growth seen in McDonald’s sales.  Chances are high that they will notice how well the PlayatMCD.com promotion did.  If they don’t pay attention, let’s just say they aren’t doing their jobs right.

JON C. OGG