Website traffic: Barack Obama vs. Hillary Clinton

Ever since I read a friend's Facebook note that Barack Obama's servers were crushed by the power of hope, I wondered how his traffic levels compared to Hillary Clinton's.

So, who's received more Internet traffic? Answer: It's all in how you measure traffic, which means there's no clear winner here.

Using the site Compete.com to compare site traffic between Obama and Clinton, the answer isn't as clear cut as the first graph below.

First of all, let's look at "people count" -- a measure of unique visitors to each site. Unique visitors means "they only count a person once no matter how many times they visit a site in a given month." So, if you visited a thousand times in one month, it counts just as much as the guy who only went to one page in the same month.



Uniques tell you one thing: the number of individuals who visited your site (with some variance: a guy at work can count twice if he also visits at home, etc.) and this is an OK measure. However, it's not a true measure of traffic volume.

Traffic volume can also be measured by visits. Visits are described as the following:

Visits are initiated when a user enters a site. As the user interacts with the site the visit is live. Visits are considered live until the user's interaction with the site has ceased for a 30-minute period.

For instance, User A enters Yahoo at 9:00. User A checks their email and reviews the week's weather forecast. User A then goes to a meeting at 9:30. She returns at 10:30 and checks her Yahoo email again. Since 30 minutes lapsed between her two interactions User A is considered "one person" that made "two visits."

Again, Obama's also a winner in this category. Not a big surprise, really. He does have more Facebook friends, after all.

But now let's switch gears for a moment away from traffic and look at engagement metrics for Obama and Clinton.

First, take a look at average stay, which is the "number of minutes an average visitor spends on a site during each visit." Notice that Obama's held the lead here, but Clinton's made considerable gains in the past few months to catch him. People are looking to investigate the issues and evaluate and compare the two -- or at least that's my guess.



Another thing I'd consider here is that Obama's site has lots of social networking features. Sure, this is a cool thing, but it could mean that more of his supporters are spending time doing MySpace-ish stuff than the Clinton users who are perhaps newer and learning more about the candidate's stances on issues. Newer users spending more time online learning about a candidate is more valuable (at least I'd argue it is) than visitors using your site to blog about a candidate they're already supporting. I'd pose a theory that Clinton users are more interested in text-based content than social interaction, which Obama users might favor more heavily. Now, which one translates into votes at the polls? We'll soon see.

But here's the shocker folks. When it comes down to the number of pages per visit in a month, Clinton has the huge advantage since November. Check it out:



What could account for this? Several things: 1.) Obama's site might use a lot of AJAX, and using AJAX lowers page view count, 2.) People visit Obama's site, but they don't click through. 3.) Clinton voters are coming to learn more about her in one sitting, whereas Obama visitors are coming once to see a new piece of media, then leave.

A lot of site analytics data doesn't mean that it'll determine tomorrow's outcome, but it's interesting to think about. As we continue in the years to come, learning what it all means will become crucial to campaigns in their communication strategy. Right now we're in the infantile years of online political communication. Just imagine the innovation we'll see in the next four years and how that'll rapidly change the landscape of how we vote as younger generations become more technologically savvy.

(Cross posted to Nerdlusus)