As we mentioned yesterday , thousands of people every month are visiting Obama.com expecting to find Barack Obama’s campaign website. Instead, they find a Japanese site full of links for loans and hair transplants.
Thanks to the Web analytics firm
Compete
, we can begin to get an idea of how many eyeballs this is costing the Obama campaign. Compete provided
Slate
with “downstream” data–where people went after visiting Obama.com–for the 100,000-plus people who visited the site in June of the year:
- 21 percent went directly BarackObama.com.
- 40 percent went to a search engine.
- 17 percent tried another incorrect URL for Obama’s site.
- 22 percent gave up and went elsewhere.
Of those 17 percent who took a second guess and failed,
barakobama.com
and
barrackobama.com
were the biggest attractions, both of which redirect to a Google search for the correct spelling of Obama’s name.
Obama.org
and
Obamma.com
also show up.
As
S
late
‘s Paul Boutin
has written before
, Web analytics data is fungible. (Just
ask Google
.) But we can safely assume from these numbers that a failure to proactively register a wide variety of misspellings and alternate URLs is costing the campaign tens of thousands of page views a month. I presume that neither campaign needs my advice that every page view counts.
