Vote the Site Final Report Released!

0 Comment(s) | Posted January 14, 2009 by Clay Schossow | 

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Clay Schossow

Clay Schossow leads New Media Campaigns' project management and business development efforts. A graduate of UNC Chapel Hill, he has guided more than 200 websites from concept to launch. He is a frequent writer on Internet marketing and online campaigning. You should follow him on Twitter.

In late October, we decided to work on a side project known as Vote the Site. The site let visitors vote on which candidate had the better campaign website.  Visitors could vote on any Congressional level race or higher.  In addition to the marketing benefits of a microsite, our goal was to gather a significant piece of data and see if there is a correlation between a good campaign website and successful campaign.

After gaining more than 15,000 votes, we're confident that we had a pretty significant data set. The results were certainly interesting and confirmed our original hypothesis about the link between a good campaign site and a successful campaign.  The data gathered will definitely help us, as a political web design firm, sell potential clients on the importance of a high quality online campaign.  Here's a quick snapshot of the report:

• Campaigns that won on Vote the Site were nearly twice as likely to win the actual election
• Campaigns that lost on Vote the Site were 1.33x more likely to lose the actual election
• Democrats won 65% of the online campaigns
• Action centers are nearly ubiquitous, with 75% of campaigns featuring them on the homepage of the campaign site.
• Online video has spiked in popularity with over half of all campaigns featuring video on the homepage
• For more detailed information, go view the report  or download it in PDF format.

We encourage you to forward the report along to your friends, share with your clients, and use to make informed decisions.

We're very pleased with the results and with the success of VTS. Thousands of people viewed and voted on the site, it earned media attention from across the country, it referred interested visitors onto New Media Campaigns, and it was an exiciting experiment.  Vote the Site turned out to be a great marketing technique for us, and I am confident that we will launch other side projects in the future after this successful microsite campaign.

Do the results surprise you? What is your take on the data we gathered? Thanks again for everyone's participation and help in making this project a success.

Categorized in: Design, Microsite, Politics, Internet Marketing