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The day of reckoning is almost upon us. Tomorrow Australia will go to the polls to decide who our next Prime Minister will be. And like every election before it, the Australian public has been flooded with a tsunami of advertising and marketing messages.  The 2010 election was widely anticipated to be the most digital campaign ever following Obama’s success in leveraging digital media. So with the campaign trail now winding to a halt, now is the perfect time to reflect upon which party won the online race.

In order to judge the winner, performance across a range of key digital channels was analysed including the web site, online video, social media and search. The verdict can be found below:

Web Site

Measuring the performance of a web site is worthy of a post in itself. For the sake of simplicity however, aspects such as content quality, usability, information architecture and functionality have been ignored (as important as they are). Instead, web site traffic has been chosen as the primary metric to analyse performance. At the end of the day, the web site is the central hub for all Party information and communications, and the ability to draw people to the site is the core online goal.

Without access to the web analytics of each site, it is necessary to rely on third party tools for this assessment. And while such tools are often inaccurate in terms of absolute numbers, they often predict indicative trends correctly. Alexa is one of the oldest tools of this kind, and it reveals that the Labor Party has maintained the lead for most of the election race:

Likewise, Google Ad Planner confirms a lead for Labor in terms of both unique visitors and page views:

Verdict – The Labor Party seems to have done a better job at pulling users into their site to consume Party content, albeit by a relatively small margin

Search

Search engines are now the primary information resource on the planet. As such, they play a critical role in modern election campaigns. Each Party must be able to connect with voters as they seek out policy information at a key moment of influence. As such, search engines are a critical channel for both Labor and Liberal.

As with the web site, it is only possible to estimate the extent of activity via third party tools such as Keyword Spy. As with web site traffic, the data should be viewed as indicative only. With that in mind, Keyword Spy provides the following insights:

My expectation is that the Liberal Party is far more active within the search engines than this data suggests. However, it is clear that they trail Labor in terms of investment in search engine marketing. It is possible that the threat of legal ramifications surrounding their search advertising tactics has scared them off.

Labor also maintains a lead in terms of actual search behaviour as indicated by Google Insights. Julia Gillard’s name has accrued more searches than both Tony Abbott and the Liberal Party. Interestingly, the ALP trails all three aforementioned search terms by a significant margin. Is the individual bigger than the Party?

Verdict – The Labor Party lead both investment in search engine advertising, along with actual search volume. So they take the search crown.

Online Video/Viral

YouTube has given traditional television commercials a true lease of life online. And as opposed to TV, online viewers voluntarily choose to view content, as opposed to it being pushed to them via the television. As such, YouTube views are an excellent metric to consider when analysing how effectively party messages are resonating with the audience.

Given the conversative/negative nature of the campaign, it’s no real surprise to find that most of the ads linger at a few hundred views. There were however a couple of standouts that managed to gain viral traction. Labor’s Time Warp parody garnered almost 50,000 views before they removed it for copyright reasons. Despite the copyright infringement, others have copied and re-posted the video, which continues to generate tens of thousands of views:

On the other side of the fence, the Liberal Party had great success with the Kevin O’Lemon theme. The original advertisement generated almost 80,000 views, sparking two sequels and a Facebook game (Labor lemons). The first drew a further 50,000 views, but it seemed the public had tired of the concept by the third iteration, with only 15,000 views achieved. The Liberal Party has disabled the embed feature, so unfortuantely I can’t post it here.

Verdict – While the Labor Party has generated more total views, the Liberal Party has been more effective at creating distinct messages that spread via the web. So they take out the online video category.

Social Media

There are a range of techniques that can be used to measure the effectiveness of social media activity. The two primary methods pertain to reach (the number of people that receive the message) and sentiment (the tone of conversation around the subject). From a purist perspective, engagement style can also be considered.

Starting with quantitative metrics (reach), Gillard has been far more effective at building an audience via social media. However, the Liberal Party takes the cake in generating more traction around generic party profiles. Personally, I suspect people relate to leaders ahead of parties, so I’d score this one to Labor:

Beyond simply building an audience, the ability of each party to build positive discussion and sentiment around their brand is crucial. Quantitative sentiment analysis of social media conversations is far from perfect, and this is reflected in the different outcomes declared by separate parties:

• Election.ly declared Tony Abbott the winner
• The ABC’s Campaign Pulse sentiment tracker has Gillard ahead
• Nielsen declared Julia Gillard the winner
• Experian Hitwise also awarded the chocolates to Gillard

Based on weight of numbers, it seems Gillard is the winner on social media sentiment as well.

The final consideration from a social media perspective is engagement style. From a purist point of view, social media is a two-way communications channel that necessitates hands-on interaction with the audience. Yet the sheer scale of conversations means it is literally impossible for politicians to truly engage with their audience. Despite this, Gillard once again takes the points for making a token effort at answering some questions sent her way via Twitter. Abbott on the other hand is an old school broadcaster, with no audience interaction.

Verdict – Gillard and the Labor Party are resounding winners in the social space. They also get bonus points for implementing social features on their own site including a social network for supporters/lobbyists (Labor Connect) and crowdsourced ideas tool (Think Tank).

Final Verdict

With ownership of three of the four channels, the online election has clearly been won by the Labor Party. And while they may not have owned the digital channel in an Obama style manner, they have done enough to beat the opposition. And isn’t that the whole point of an election?

Now for the interesting part… to see if they’ve done enough in total to hold off the challenge from the Liberal Party.