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Traffic to Super Bowl advertisers' websites increased dramatically during and after the game, according to internet infrastructure provider Akamai, which released findings from its Net Usage Index for Advertising.

Traffic to the sites, which averaged about 80,000 visitors per minute in the 2-3 weeks before the game, doubled to 160,000 throughout the majority of the game. Halftime sent a lot of Super Bowl viewers to the web, with traffic spiking at 227,957 per minute at about the same time that Prince was preparing for his show.

Visits increased even more just prior to the end of the game, when the number of visitors averaged 280,000 per minute. The increase was more pronounced on Monday, when people were back at work, with almost 300,000 visitors per minute in the morning.

Advertisers that actively promoted their web address in their spots saw experienced the most immediate website traffic increases, Akamai said.

Unfortunately, as Search Engine Watch writes, not all advertisers recognized the advantage of including a web address in their spots: Some big names did not, and some that did made the URL so small it was difficult to read.

The Akamai data shows web traffic to an anonymous aggregate of 21 of Akamai customer sites (Anheuser-Busch, GoDaddy.com and Garmin, among others) that integrated their broadcast advertising campaigns with an online component.