One of the hopes of anyone who paid the money to advertise on this year’s Super Bowl (or any year for that matter) is to generate sales and web traffic. In addition, it would be nice result if the number of searches for your brand went up as well. Based on some research by Hitwise, I suspect that the retention rate for Bud Light commercials run during the game goes down as the consumption rate of Bud Light during the game goes up but that’s my informal theory.

It appears that in the week following a Super Bowl people seem to need a little reminder (or some kind of aggregation) of what ads were run during the big game. Hitwise ran some numbers on searches for Super Bowl ads for the week ending February 13 to see what the search landscape looked like and it was not exactly brand specific.

Some other numbers regarding how brands fared in searches show that it pays to have either a pre-game controversy about your ad (Focus on the Family and Tim Tebow) or have a kid smack down his mom’s date (Doritos) to get a little love in the area of search.

In the end who was the real big winner? Google. Why? Well, approximately 70% whatever searches that were done for anything were done on Google and they didn’t need their ad to make that a reality. That would have happened regardless. Also YouTube was the biggest winner by seeing almost 13 percent of the overall clicks from terms in Hitwise’s portfolio of ads for Super Bowl 2010.

Maybe next year Google should run a YouTube ad to remind everyone that when they are clear of their party they can see the ads there the next day. Heck, they might even make a little money.