Findings also diverged in the area of car ads that ran on Super Bowl Sunday. iCrossing ranked the SEM efforts of both Ford, Honda, and GM fairly as "contenders," while it gave Toyota its highest possible ranking, "winners."

"Toyota showed that it was ready to get a lot of mileage from its Camry hybrid commercial," read the iCrossing report. "The automaker was highly visible for brand- and model-specific terms as well as for an extensive list of more generic terms such as 'hybrid electric car,' 'hybrid electric vehicle,' 'hybrid electric,' 'gas electric hybrid car,' 'hybrid gasoline electric,' 'hybrid gas electric,' 'electric hev hybrid vehicle,' 'electric hybrid motor,' 'hybrid electric gas vehicle,' and 'electric and hybrid vehicle today,' proving that Toyota was well prepared to meet the interest of its target customers."

Reprise was thoroughly unimpressed by automakers' SEM efforts. "Other than Cadillac, a major Super Bowl XL sponsor, all of the Automotive companies put forth a fairly uninspired effort, often getting bumped from the first page of results for a long line of resellers and service providers."

"We were trying to measure which companies developed the greatest visibility online," said Noah Elkin, director of industry relations at iCrossing. "There are many others' ad rankings out there that use different criteria to arrive at different conclusions."

iCrossing's overall index attempted to demonstrate the visibility of a company on a sliding scale from 1 to 10 for a defined set of branded, non-branded and generic Super Bowl commercial keywords.

Over 50 percent of the year's Super Bowl ads finished at the "back of the pack" by iCrossing's analysis. MasterCard, McDonald's, and Procter & Gamble's Gillette brand were also deemed back-of-the-packer's.

Surprisingly, iCrossing also relegated Pizza Hut to the back of the pack, despite Pizza Hut placing a URL prominently on its TV spots--which attempted to drive viewers to a microsite designed by Atmosphere BBDO specially for the occasion. The spot features Jessica Simpson serenading a bar full of Muppets with Pizza Hut's new Cheesy Bites pizza.

"If Pizza Hut runs another commercial featuring Jessica Simpson in a starring role, it should make sure to optimize around terms such as 'Jessica Simpson commercial' and run paid media alongside (neither of which it did this year) to maximize the traffic it channels to its website," scolded RDM's report.

The top ads picked by research firms like Reprise for integration were not necessarily the ads that captured the public's imagination. An America Online poll found that the Budweiser "Streaker" ad was the most popular, garnering 13 percent of the more than 300,000 votes cast by Monday.