Hi Daniel Macpherson,

Thanks for your comments. I kind of agree where you are coming from and 10% may be the correct figure for across the board including crikey, ninemsn and all the other news related sites in regards to political news.

But what I am talking about is in regards to how many visitors the party websites get over the election period and whether they should bother pouring election funds into the website.

Ninemsn went down twice this week once for death of Steve and once for Peter Brock. This would have been 100,000's of visitors per minute visiting those news sites for those servers to be busy. Did the party sites receive the same - I doubt it!

In fact, if you ask the webmaster of TeamBeattie how many unique vistors they had over the 6 week election period, I have a good source that tells me you'll find it will be considerably less than 20,000 unique visitors - which far less than 0.1% of the voting population in QLD!

This shows that people are hardly interested in going to the party websites during the election period and hence my original point of whether the parties should bother going to the extent of all the bells and whistles for their websites.

Thanks for your comments.

Hi Bob22,

Interesting stats for the TeamBeattie site. A common method of measuring unique visitors is through the IP address of the visitor, in which case it is only really measuring "households". For example, all traffic from a university may appear as just one visitor - the IP address of the their web proxy. I expect there are better ways of measuring visitors using browser cookies. Can you tell us what TeamBeattie were using?

Hi Sams,

I don't know what TeamBeattie.com use (I am not the webmaster), I have just a good source in this area and the approximate amount of visitors.

I assume TeamBeattie would be using something similar to what most people use these days with unique visitors and if using say something like ASP.NET the server generates a unique session cookie for each visitor which makes it accurate to work out a new visitor based even if they share a proxy IP (same IP).

If that is cookie-based stats, rather than IP-based, then TeamBeattie's traffic was quite poor! As you may have guessed, one of my clients is a political party. Although I can't divulge figures, I can say that they gave TB a run for its money on web presence.

Another factor to consider for election websites is the vital role they play for the media and for party members. Also interesting is to what extent news "spreads" from people reading a website to others. The qualities of the kind of people that visit political websites is a key consideration in this.

Election website don't need to be expensive. I can put together a Plone website for costs in the order of thousands of dollars (rather than tens or hundreds of thousands) using free technology such as Plone. After a some training, my clients can then add and organise their own content through Plone's WYSIWYG editor, WebDAV, etc. Things like RSS feeds work out-of-the-box. In that sense, they make for fairly cheap publishing and advertising platforms, with a rapid workflow from spokespeople to the public.

My experience working with a political party is that despite what many people think, they more often than not can't get the media coverage that they want. Almost always, the media will only pick up on certain topics, leading to the very distorted perception of that party's policies and views. Websites are one of the few ways that a party can at least try to address this imbalance.

Hi Bob222,

Good to hear about your source on this. I wanted to make sure you didn't just pick some figure out of the air as some are prone to do. Yes, 20,000 unique visitors is a low figure for a website.

However, that doesn't change the point of Dann's article, which is to examine what the sites have and what they don't have.

Following that with the figure you present, what if the lack participatory Web 2.0 technology (which the article outlines) could account for the lack of visitors? What if an increase in Web 2.0 functionality could increase vistors to political sites? The internet is an interactive medium, which is why it seems logical and fitting to make websites as interactive as possible. And there are many examples of this is the UK and US.

Perhaps it's more than people just don't care, period, but more so the functionality of such sites doesn't cater to people browsing on the web... at the moment.

Also, it's interesting that you mention TeamBeattie's low stats but also say that the Coalition were smarter not focusing too much energy on their site without mentioning any of their stats. I had a look at the stats for both sites for Alexa users (Sadly, I don't have many insider sources) and the reach is significantly higher for TeamBeattie and the site has a better ranking. From this I also would assume the unique visitors figure for the Coalition site is lower too. Of course these figures only apply to people using Alexa, but I think the comparison is still applicable to websurfers in general.

So, I don't see how your reasoning stands that the Coalition is smarter when TeamBeattie is getting more traffic. Can you clarify your position on this?

- Daniel

Hi Daniel,

Thanks for your comments and point of view.

The alexa search engine would only be used by a minority, in fact so much that I don't know of anyone in any of my circles both business, political or personal who use it!

The stats from this may be distorted because people may be going to those pages on the website by searching on terms (eg. water saving devices and may other issues that may not be directly related to the campaign).

Would you agree that the real success of the website in the campaign would be determined by not visitors alone (as anyone can drive traffic to a website with PPC and many other ways) but by:

1. How many people signed up for more information.

2. How many people went past the first page (paths)

and

3. How many people returned to the website more than once.

I mean Web 2.0 stuff is neat and fancy, but I don't agree it would really change peoples mind at the end of the day.

I don't really know how much any of the parties spent on the websites but I do agree with you they could be doing a lot more. But my reasoning is at end of the day how much difference would it make and may be the greens didn't really see the value in it, nor did the others.

The greens just had a simple solution to provide information and that worked. Web 2.0 and all the jazz is great for the web designers to charge more but it would have to be demonstrated quite well that this does make a difference.

For the QLD election if the greens or libs, or nats put millions into the website, would it really have made a huge difference to the outcome?

In this election I believe it would not have.