Advertisers on this year's Super Bowl were able to drive game watchers to the web in huge numbers, showing greater sophistication in developing commercials that combine TV with the Internet, a research firm said Tuesday.

Based on a survey of 1,530 U.S. consumers in the week before last Sunday's football championship, 77 percent of the respondents said they expected to use the Internet on game day, primarily due to advertisers' cross-promotions between TV and the web, market researcher ComScore Networks said. More than 1 in 4 of the respondents planning on watching the Super Bowl said the ads would be their favorite aspect of the game.

Advertisers made good use of this attention by building micro-websites related to the message in the TV advertisement. For example, a commercial promoting the Cadillac V-Series's ability to travel from 0 to 60 mph in less than five seconds directed viewers to the Cadillacunder5.com website.

"Advertisers are placing more emphasis on fully integrated marketing programs," Graham Mudd, analyst for ComScore, said. "What that means in many cases is offline promotions are driving people online, and online promotions are driving people offline. The most important element is delivering a consistent message."

TV advertising alone has its limits because it's a passive medium, Mudd said. Add the web, however, and people can get more involved in the promotion.

"It's a way to get people more engaged with the brand," Mudd said.

Budweiser.com was this year's top gaining advertiser site, which means the beer company did not disappoint the 80 percent of the survey respondents who said the beer company's Budweiser-Bud Light commercial was the one they most wanted to see.

The Budweiser.com website saw a traffic increase of almost 600 percent on Super Bowl Sunday, compared with the average of the four previous Sundays, ComScore found. Moreover, the site was up significantly for much of the week leading up to the game, as surfers visited to see an ad spoofing singer Janet Jackson's "wardrobe malfunction" last year. Budweiser pulled the spoof from its Super Bowl lineup.

Second was web services company GoDaddy.com, whose somewhat risqu commercial satirizing government indecency hearings drove traffic to that site 378 percent above average, ComScore said. Third was Olympus America Inc., which increased traffic to Olympusamerica.com 363 percent through its ad on the Olympus M:Robe media player.

Rounding out the top five were Apple Computer Inc.'s iTunes ad, which drove traffic 172 percent, and the Cadillac ad that upped traffic 171 percent.

ComScore found that the highest spikes in traffic occurred immediately after the commercials were aired.

"Spikes very closely correlated the advertisement itself," Mudd said.