Using Web Metrics to Analyze the ‘Palin Effect’ & 2008 Presidential Campaign

By Brent D. Payne

A fellow friend and SEO, Vinny Goldsmith, mentioned I should do a blog post about the trends and reasons behind those trends regarding the ‘Palin Effect’.

As many of you are aware, Sarah Palin has been quite the buzz on the internet over the past few weeks. In fact, Sarah Palin related queries (all queries broad matching to ‘Palin’) resulted in 7.18% of Tribune Interactive’s total unique visits from search engines during the month of September. That’s nothing to sneeze at, that’s for sure.

The chart below shows that, for Tribune, she garnered nearly two-thirds of the market share when compared to the other three candidates on the 2008 ticket (broad match on other candidates’ surnames as well).

Furthermore, a Sarah Palin related query (not releasing which) was the top non-branded query for Tribune Interactive during the month of September. This single query alone drove over 1% of Tribune’s overall SEO Visits. Nice work Sarah . . . nice work!

But it’s important to also understand whether the trends that Tribune is seeing with Sarah Palin and the campaign, match what Google is seeing overall with the campaign as well. Perhaps Tribune is simply doing horrible for Barack Obama and doing extremely well for Sarah Palin. How do we determine if this is a Tribune issue or truly what is happening on the internet? Well . . . we turn to Google Trends.

The above is a chart of search queries for the terms: Obama, McCain, Biden, and Palin for the month of September 2008 in the United States only. It appears that Palin is getting a lot of queries! In fact, let’s find out how large of the search query market she has . . .

Damn! She has almost 50% of the search queries when compared to the other candidates. That’s a significant portion of the share. She is definitely an opportunity to capture in search if you are a media/news organization such as Tribune.

At this point, then, let’s take a step back and evaluate how Tribune is doing against the above market share numbers from Google Trends. This will give me a good indicator as to where Tribune is winning and where they are falling behind on the opportunities that exist in the 2008 campaign.

Sorry for the confusion on the colors . . . but we can work around that.

According to the comparison between these two charts we can determine the following:

Barack Obama: Tribune is underperforming

Sarah Palin: Tribune is performing well above average

John McCain: Tribune is underperforming significantly

Joseph Biden: Tribune is underperforming very significantly (but may not be worth chasing).

It appears Tribune has a lot of work to do before the campaign to get the other candidates names ranking better in the search engines. (Psst: Feel free to help via some inlinks.) Tribune is nailing it with Sarah Palin but once the other candidate names get on track to where they should be, that will eat away at Palin’s current market share. So Tribune will need to continue to focus on Palin while getting even more aggressive on Obama.

But now let’s do something even more interesting . . . let’s see if the Sarah Palin queries are positive or negative. Let’s see what the public is searching for that’s related to Sarah Palin versus the other candidates. How can we do that? Well, let’s check out Google’s new research tool . . . Google Insights for Search.

If you choose a date range of September 2008, select the geographic region of United States, and enter the term of each of the candidates last names (run separate queries), you get the following related search terms returned to you.

Note: Interesting that ‘Lipstick on a Pig’ didn’t make this list under any of the candidates.

Personally, I feel the above search queries (in approximate order by the way, according to G’Insights) aren’t queries that are going to help McCain-Palin win the ticket come November. Why? Because it appears to be significantly entertainment based and at times even reflects queries that are unfavorable to the McCain-Palin campaign (i.e. couric, interview, etc.). The queries for Obama are considerably more serious and contain no negative connotation to the queries.

So why isn’t Tribune doing as well for Barack Obama? After all, Tribune’s second largest newspaper (ChicagoTribune.com) is located in Chicago. Plus, Obama is an Illinois Senator and Tribune has significant historical content on Barack Obama. In contrast they have very little historical content on Sarah Palin and, as we are all aware, she lives in Alaska (Tribune has no news organizations in Alaska). Why isn’t Tribune, and more specifically, Chicago Tribune able to capture a larger share of the Obama queries? Check out the following screen shot . . .

Look at all of those Obama sites! Holy cow! That is a lot of sites being ran by Barack Obama and his campaign. It’s kind of tough to rank too well. Furthermore, the competition for Barack Obama is considerably higher. If you compare the domain strength of the sites ranking well for Barack Obama versus ranking well for Sarah Palin, you will see a stark contrast.

So, in closing, is there really a ‘Palin Effect’ occurring out there? Oh, ‘You betcha!’ there is. Everyone is interested in her as a celebrity of sorts though (based on the queries) more so than interested in hearing about her political stance, poll numbers, etc. They want to see the latest Tina Fey video that takes jabs at Sarah Palin. They want to see pictures/photos of Palin. Plus, they want to see ‘that interview’ that everyone keeps talking about. Sarah Palin has become an overnight celebrity. But, perhaps unfortunately for her, she is not being queried like a serious political candidate. Looks like the Secret Service may not need to setup a camp within a stone’s throw of Russia afterall.

About Brent D. Payne

Brent D. Payne is the person leading the charge for SEO within Tribune Interactive where he recently doubled the number of unique visitors from search engines (year over year) for the Tribune Interactive properties such as Chicago Tribune and L.A. Times. He works closely with both editorial leads and technical leads within Tribune as well as working with external companies such as search engines, outside consultants, or other enterprise sites. When Brent isn’t doing SEO, he is . . . well, doing SEO. Yeah, it pretty much consumes his life . . . at least when he doesn’t have his 5-year old son.