What do you do when you can’t find the information you’re looking for? You look somewhere else. This is the case for the dreaded 404 error page on a website, which frustrates consumers because they have to go back, or irritates them to the point that they leave your website.

When Wendy’s, the hamburger fast food chain in America, updated its website from OWCS to Drupal, the removal of legacy pages created thousands of 404 errors.

Users perceive these errors negatively, so we launched a new 404 page on wendys.com featuring the classic arcade game BurgerTime. Website users began playing the game and engaging on our error page rather than exiting it.

This dead end was suddenly quietly becoming an engaging destination, and we were tasked with the (albeit strange) objective to drive users to a dead page.

Our idea was to drive traffic to a dead page.

A dead page with the classic arcade game BurgerTime remade, with Wendy’s as the hero and frozen beef as the enemy. Fresh, never frozen beef is Wendy’s core differentiator from our competitors. In the game, website users control Wendy (our mascot) and navigate a level to collect Wendy’s menu items to build a combo meal and score points. Players also have to avoid being frozen by frozen beef patties, or else it’s game over.

Our 404 error page is a game, an entertaining way to reinforce Wendy’s core brand and product messaging by making users collect our food and avoid the real enemy: frozen beef.

Wendy’s Twitter presence has successfully built relevance with consumers by leveraging cultural moments and conversations. Because of this, we used Twitter to tell the world about wendys.com/404.

Our tweets perform best when they are set against cultural context (#NuggsForCarter) or an existing conversation (our competitors’ use of frozen beef). We couldn’t just make a successful tweet about a dead page for no reason — we needed an existing conversation or moment to build off to promote our page.

We constructed social listening queries to uncover data around 404 error conversations we could join.

On July 16, 2018, we uncovered social listening data that Amazon Prime Day was trending across social media, and traditional media outlets were reporting the retail giant’s massive sales that day. Upon further investigation, we discovered many users were upset that Amazon.com was down and displaying an error page when they tried to order — so upset they couldn’t get in on the day’s deals that they were taking to social media to air their frustrations. This was the perfect time to tell the world about our error page.

We leveraged this social conversation by organically tweeting that if wendys.com was down, you would at least be able to play a game, and we provided a link to wendys.com/404 that began driving traffic to a dead page.

Wendy’s launch tweet of our BurgerTime game garnered more than 1.2 million impressions and doubled our Twitter engagement rate benchmark.

Website traffic tripled as Wendy’s organic tweet led users to our website to play BurgerTime. Turns out they played a lot. Time on site increased eight times as users were building a meal combo and avoiding the dreaded frozen beef. They began sharing their high scores on social media and demanding more levels to play.

Most importantly, as users were playing, they started to place orders. Online orders increased by 40%, turning our error page into a destination.