Nielsen NetRatings caught my eye today with a press release claiming that Barack Obama has a head start over McCain on the Web. The release includes several charts and graphs for people who like pretty pictures, but I’m not sure of how that means Obama got a head start.
So I decided to turn to two other sources of third-party Web analytics: Quantcast and Compete.
Compete’s metrics for McCain versus Obama now go back two years (yea!). McCain appears to have achieved some traffic as far back as June 2006. Obama did not register on Compete’s radar until the next month. In that very minor respect, McCain had a head start.
If you look at the Monthly Visitors data, Obama currently enjoys a 5-to-1 advantage over McCain in Compete’s estimate — but McCain is picking up visitors at a faster rate.
If you look at Page Views per Visit, they are more closely matched but Obama is still winning with 6.3 to 4.1. Furthermore, Obama’s visitors are increasingly spending more time on his site than McCain’s visitors are — meaning that Obama is being more engaging with his Web audience than McCain.
But here is where Obama’s problem starts to show up: Compete estimates an average of 2 visits per person per month for Obama as opposed to 1.3 visits per person per month for McCain. Why is that a problem? Because a relatively small number of loyal visitors can radically increase visitor counts, page view counts, average duration estimates, etc. That is, a hardcore group of supporters can make a Web site look like it’s really more popular than it actually is.
If you go back and look at Compete’s estimated unique monthly visitors, you see 2.5 million for Obama and 800,000 for McCain. The ratio has been cut almost in half, and the gap has narrowed from 4,000,000 visitors to 1,700,000 visitors. That means Obama is not reaching nearly as many more people as one might think if one doesn’t look closely at the data.
Compete’s Velocity report suggests that McCain is actually picking up speed while people are losing interest in Obama — something that seems to contradict what the other data shows.
Still, if we’re seeing mixed signals from Compete, what does Quantcast tell us?
Like Nielsen and Compete, Quantcast suggests that Obama gets more traffic than the McCain site does. Quantcast estimates 3.3 million visitors to Obama’s site in June and only 1 million visitors to McCain’s site. Nielsen suggested that Obama received 2.3 million unique visitors and McCain received 563,000 visitors.
These numbers just don’t add up. How can three different services arrive at three different estimates of traffic for two high profile, high volume Web sites? It would be interesting if we could look at their server logs or analytics. Oh well….
Looking at Quantcasts’s data a little more deeply, you see that McCain does better than Obama with the 3 to 11-year-old audience. I’m not sure what that means, but I hope the parents of these kids know what kind of sites their children are surfing to.
Barack Obama seems to be about evenly supported by people aged 18 and up, whereas McCain’s appeal is weakest (among voting age groups) among the 18-34 year-olds.
On the other hand, McCain holds up better with middle income families than does Obama. Having too many wealthy backers can be detrimental to a politician’s career (or beneficial). In the long run, the money may pay off better for Obama if only because he’ll get more advertising and promotion.
But once you start looking at the ethnicity breakdowns (keep in mind these are only estimates and we don’t know how reliable the data is), McCain seems to have broader appeal across all ethnic segments of the population, whereas Obama’s African American visitors overwhelm all other ethnic groups.
The inverse relationship in ethnic group appeal between McCain and Obama’s Web sites suggests to me that they both need to do something about their content. Neither candidate is reaching out to the other candidate’s core Internet audiences very well.
Obama’s educational statistics are equally underwhelming. A very high percentage of his visitors have advanced college degrees. Why is that a problem? Because most Americans do NOT have advanced college degrees. Obama is not reaching as many middle electorate people as McCain seems to be.
From a search engine optimization point of view, I can already suggest a strategy for both candidates: McCain needs to make his site more appealing and comment-worthy; Obama needs to tone down his rhetoric and start talking directly to the people.
Both candidates appear to have significant core audiences (Quantcast calls them “addicts” and “regulars”) but Obama’s core audience comprises a much larger percentage of his visitors. In fact, Quantcast currently shows no “addicts” for McCain, which implies that McCain’s message is not preached to the choir nearly as often as Obama’s message is.
Choir-supported sermons are not necessarily bad things. Obama is clearly playing to his strengths with his Web site, but in search engine optimization just focusing on your strengths tends to be the kiss of death. You need to focus on your weaknesses and address them with an effective strategy.
Reaching the same people more often is less likely to accomplish your goal than reaching more people repeatedly. As long as people keep coming back you know you have a message they are interested in (even if they are only interested in bashing you for delivering your message). If people don’t come back to your Web site then it doesn’t matter how many Ph.D’s and rich folk agree with you — you’re dead in the water.
When you’re selling reasons to vote on the Internet, you need to reach as many new people as possible. Now, Obama’s message is unquestionably reaching more people than McCain’s but the question is whether Obama’s message is reaching more online influencers. The core audience factor tends to skew results very badly in competitive analysis and you have to discount that factor heavily in order to show that a Web site is really growing its traffic and reaching new markets.
Quantcast estimates that 76% of McCain’s audience are “passers-by” and that 52% of his visits come from “passers-by”.
Quantcast suggests that 72%% of Obama’s audience are “passers-by” but that only 38% of his visits are from “passers-by”.
So let’s normalize the traffic estimates and look at the approximate number of “passers-by” who visit these sites: 1,254,000 for Obama and 520,000 for McCain. That means that Obama is reaching more new people than McCain, but the ratio is less than 3-to-1.
The good news for Obama’s people is that they have done a better job of growing their Web audience and reaching out to new visitors.
The bad news, however, is that they appear to be making the most inroads with the African-American community, the wealthy and educated community, and losing ground with everyone else. More of Obama’s audience is composed of women than McCain’s, and therefore more of McCain’s audience is composed of men than Obama’s.
I don’t think this election will be decided by gender, ethnicity, wealth, or education. It will be decided by whomever least irritates the electorate the most and whomever comes out looking more effective than the other.
McCain has enough time to build his Web empire gracefully so that past months’ disparities won’t matter. Unfortunately for McCain, his SEO plan doesn’t look so good. His front page is crowded and ugly and his search results don’t reveal any site links.
Obama has pulled off one of my favorite tricks: he’s made a splash page into his home page and it ranks really well. Also, Obama has Google site links, whereas McCain doesn’t. Going over to the current number 2 search engine (Microsoft’s Live), we see that Obama’s results look much better than McCain’s. McCain’s senate page outranks his Web site. Maybe that’s just the Microsoft algorithm and maybe it’s something else.
I can tell you that seeing Obama’s picture on the cover of Time magazine in his Microsoft Live results is much more impressive than seeing some poor guy laid out on a table or a pirate flag with McCain’s head in it. If anyone told McCain to ignore Microsoft’s search engine, they should be flattened, pancaked, dragged over hot coals, and then fired.
You cannot afford to ignore 77-80 million monthly searchers. Google only gets 130-135 million monthly searchers. Yahoo! gets another 55-60 million monthly searchers. Yahoo!’s search results look boring compared to Google and Microsoft’s search results for McCain and Obama. Yahoo! definitely needs to fire Carl Icahn as a stockholder and spend more time improving its search interface.
I ran some queries for “presidential candidate” on all three engines. They’ve done a good algorithmic job of serving up content about what it is to be a U.S. presidential candidate but Obama snuck into the top ten on Microsoft: Obama 1, McCain 0.
Ron Paul outranks them both for “president 2008″ on Google and Yahoo!. Obama took the highest slot on Microsoft (he ranked number 2 below a blog). Ron Paul: 2, Obama 1, McCain 0.
If I were an SEO working for either campaign (disclaimer: I don’t at this time have any relationships with either campaign), I would be hard at work trying to develop an edge because, frankly, neither candidate’s site is poised to give him an advantage in the election.
I’ll agree with Nielsen: Obama is out ahead of McCain, but Obama has some choke points that need to be dealt with. McCain still has an opportunity to turn this around. He needs to clean up his site design, make it look less like a fake news site (that is SO black hat it isn’t funny) and turn it into an interesting rest stop on the information superhighway.
McCain actually is better positioned to make significant inroads into the Internet because he has a much broader audience appeal. He just hasn’t put up anything that should appeal to someone who doesn’t spend their days watching Fox News and reading U.S. News & World Report.
In my opinion, that’s not going to win any elections. And it certainly doesn’t do much in terms of optimizing for search.
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