Obama Outperforms McCain in Online Campaign

ComScore has just released some interesting statistics on online campaigns performance of Barack Obama and John McCain. The report addresses the first six month of 2008 and takes into account visits to their respective websites, videos viewed, searches for both Barack Obama and John McCain on 5 major US search engines and display advertising efforts of both candidates across the entire web.

The result is predictable: Obama seems to be doing better than McCain in almost all the spheres. But the reason is not all that complicated actually: Obama’s camp simply spends way much more on ads they display across the WWW. While I have no idea what exactly the amounts paid are here, the figures for total ad impressions are very illustrative anyway:

Obama also leads in the number of searches people perform for the candidate’s name: search phrases containing the word “Obama” were performed 4 times more frequently than searches for “McCain” (5.4 million vs. 1.3 million). But I actually can not be sure this one is a positive thing for Obama because oftentimes when people search for something, it means they don’t understand this “something” so when people are so heavily engaged in researching the information related to the candidate, it may be a bad sign instead. But at least it clearly indicates that people will be more likely to visit more sites appearing in the search results for “Obama”.

And this brings us to success of Barack Obama’s official website. While Obama’s site is clearly much more popular since it is visited monthly by 4 times as many people as McCain’s one (2.2 million vs. 583 thousand), here we also see one thing where McCain performs better than Obama - and this factor is video. On McCain’s website videos related to the candidate and his plans receive a very prominent position right on the homepage - hence the result: despite of the much lower number of visitors, McCain’s site seems to be way more efficient in making people consume content there - the number of video views on McCain’s site is almost 3 times higher than that on Obama’s site:

These are obviously very interesting figures that can partly explain how the two candidates approach world wide web and it is just another evidence of the assumption that Obama pays much more attention to online audience. It is also this attention that can partly explain why Obama is so much more popular with various social media sites as well.