On Feb. 13th, The Oprah Winfrey Show aired a segment called “Suicide, Lies, Debt: A Suburban Nightmare”, which featured advice from financial advisor Suze Orman. As a special feature of the show, Orman’s latest book “Women and Money” was available as a free download on Oprah.com for 33 hours. The result? A 36 month high in market share of visits to Oprah.com with a jump of 420% from the previous day. Traffic remained strong on Feb. 14th while the download was still available and reached the 2nd highest level in the past 3 years. Previous segments that also caused significant spikes in the website traffic included “The Secret behind The Secret” (2/6/08), “Lose Weight with Oprah: Boot Camp Follow Ups” (5/12/05), and “Dr. Oz on Aging” (11/01/07).

The daily upstream in traffic from search reached 39.50% on Wednesday based upon demand for the book and one interesting search term emerged – searches for ‘oprah.com’ surpassed ‘oprah’ (the two most common search terms driving traffic to the website). The search term reached a new high signaling that there may be a change in search behavior when there is a specific call to action to visit the website. Some of the previous spikes have been links to websites to purchase ‘Oprah’s Favorite Things’, action plans for the ‘Debt Diet Challenge’, and online classes from Oprah and Eckart Tolle. These types of limited time offers of free or exclusive content can be a strong sponsorship opportunity for marketers seeking new creative ideas to reach a specific audience.