Google has a very unique way to commemorate important events and anniversaries – they create beautiful doodles around the event (or person) and place them on their homepage for about a day. The logo always links to the relevant Google search results so that people can learn more about the corresponding event.

Obviously tons of people, visiting the Google homepage, would be checking out the logo related search results but have you ever wondered what kind of traffic (or pageviews) can these Google doodles bring to a site that happens to be at the first position? Steve Rubel has figured out an easy and accurate way to determine that number.

Measuring Traffic from Google Logos on the Homepage

Wikipedia is often that first site in search results for queries that are around famous people or events. And since the traffic statistics for all Wikipedia articles are public, we can get a pretty good idea of the traffic power of a Google Doodle by looking at the Wikipedia stats for the day when that logo was live on Google.com.

The traffic that a Google Doodle can generate varies anywhere between 800k and 1.5m depending on how viral the logo is. Some Google Doodles are global while others appear only in particular countries and thus drive lesser number of visitors.

Here are some Wikipedia traffic charts illustrating the “doodle effect.” Google may not be responsible 100% for the jump in traffic but you should still get an idea.