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2008 Presidential Candidate Web Traffic Trends

There and many different polls out there that gauge how our presidential candidates are doing in this 2008 election.  Sometimes they predict the correct outcome, and sometimes they are way off.  So what if there was another way to gauge the current campaign climate.  

Web Traffic Trends 

As the vast population uses the Internet on a daily basis for an increased number of daily tasks the world wide web is becoming more ingrained into our way of life.  So if we could measure the web traffic each candidate is getting at their web site, it should give us a good idea how the given candidates are doing in their campaigns.  

So who do you think is getting more web traffic?  Barack Obama or John McCain

Alexa.com collects web usage data from millions of Alexa toolbar users, adds that to some other data sources and then cranks it all through the magical Alexa computer which then outputs groovey stats about different web sites on the Internet. Think of it as the Nielsen ratings for the Internet.

Let's look at some Alexa stats and see what they say about the current presidential election between John McCain and Barack Obama.

Reach

Reach is the percentage of all Internet users that visit a particular site.

Page Views

Pages views are the amount of pages viewed by a user when visiting a site.  So if the user just went to the front page, then that would just be one page view. But if the visitor looked at 10 different pages at the site they would then have a page view count of 10. The page view statistic given by Alexa is the average number of page views by all visitors that visited the given site.

Rank

The traffic rank is a value derived from both the "reach" and "page view" statistics.  

It appears that Barack Obama is our clear leader based on these web traffic reports. This probably isn't much of a surprise since he has been campaigning much harder in the primary than John McCain who was determined the front runner for his party much earlier on. However you can see the June data for John McCain is increasing a bit more while Barack Obama's data is staying about the same. So we can tell that McCain's campaign probably picked up a bit more steam in June of 2008.

We are going to keep watching the web traffic trends of this election here at BananaForce, so check back and see how the traffic trends continue as we get closer to the big election.