US Election votes for Internet Marketing

Internet plays an increasingly important role in politics as a way to reach voters; presidential candidates are employing sophisticated Internet marketing tactics to maximize the impact of their websites. I enjoy following politics and have been an avid spectator of the on-going 2008 U.S Presidential Elections. It’s very entertaining to see how political parties compete with one another during an election to win votes.

The internet has been moving to the mainstream of political life in the US for some years. The internet favours the outsider, and gives them the ability to quickly mobilise supporters and money online. www.barackobama.com chalked up some 1.5 million volunteer accounts. In an age when voters get their information from a multiplicity of sources, internet reaches region, age groups etc. It allows candidates to target voters with pin-point accuracy. And it’s free. It costs $60 to mobilise one voter through direct mail, $30 via telephone - but only $1.56 through social networking sites and email. Both John McCain and Barack Obama have made it clear that they will use the Internet to communicate effectively if in office. Mr Obama use of social networking sites has helped Mr Obama to mobilise young people. Social networking sites are a chance for Obama to engage supporters. A stream of celebrity-fronted ads has targeted the You Tube generation, encouraging them to register to vote or vote early.

Every candidate has a blog but for the most part, it's just the voice of the campaign -- or one particular campaign staffer. People searching with the term 'end war in Iraq' will see the Barack Obama website in the results. Candidates who are identifying themselves with certain issues should look closely at how they are performing on those keywords. It is the social networking opportunities offered by the internet that has paid Barack Obama the richest dividends. Internet video clips have become mainstream, both as a way to illustrate political points and to view clips of the candidates from news and entertainment television shows.

Obama's victory in the general election was aided by his tremendous fundraising success. Since the start of 2007, his campaign relied on bigger donors and smaller donors nearly equally, pulling in successive donations mostly over the Internet. Obama’s fundraising haul was more than twice the amount Democrat John Kerry raised in 2004, and more than twice what George Bush and Al Gore combined brought in during the 2000 presidential campaign. The Democrats are succeeding with young people because they are targeting young people and they are using the Internet to successfully micro target. Micro targeting uses sophisticated computer models regularly used in commercial marketing, which helps campaigns to locate sympathetic voters and target them with individually tailored messages on issues that are predicted to be most important to them

His online success has had an impact at the polls. Internet marketing has become powerful weapon for candidates to increase their voters, fundraising etc and finally presidency. What I found most intriguing was how the campaigns are approaching social media and how they could be doing better. Their blogs are a perfect example.

Index tools is now Yahoo Web Analytics

Another site traffic statistics tool hits the web, and it’s called Yahoo Analytics. It is similar name as Google Analytics; they introduce Yahoo! Web Analytics as a powerful enterprise site analytics tool to provide real-time insight into visitor behavior on your website with powerful and flexible tools and dashboards. Major changes include a complete re-branding from Index Tools to Yahoo Web Analytics, enhancements to the tool, a new website and some increased scalability.

Real time traffic monitoring is really an awesome feature. Yahoo! Analytics is providing the same real time monitoring service. You will get detailed real-time reporting within minutes after an action on your website so that webmasters can quickly identify changes in key site metrics or they can monitor the performance of new content. Analytics works on java script tags.

How does site tracking work?

When a visitor comes and visits a web page that which is having Yahoo Web Analytics tracking code, the visitor's browser will read this tracking code and call a JavaScript file installed on the web server. Once Called, the JavaScript file will open a data collection session and set (or reset) a one-year, first-party cookie in the visitor's browser. This cookie will be stored in the visitor's browser until it expires after one year, or until the user deletes it. If user deletes cookies from his browsers, next time it will show as First-party visitor for a web page.

During the visit this first-party cookie is initially set; Yahoo Web Analytics will identify the visitor as a first-time visitor. Each time the visitor returns to your site, the cookie life will be reset to one year beyond the date of the visit, and Yahoo! Web Analytics will recognize the visitor as a returning visitor.

Yahoo analytics is having some new features

New features like drag & drop data filters, custom report wizards, and segmentation selector, allows you to view the performance or characteristics of specific types of products, visitors and web pages, which will help online marketers and website designers enhance the visitor experience, increase sales and reduce marketing costs.

Yahoo analytics could be a really useful tool. If Yahoo web analytics meets the user needs very well, I anticipate Google will be under pressure to build his analytics to retain users. Each organization should introduce new features that other doesn’t have and try their best for topmost web analytics tool. Whatever it may be, we users will be beneficial.

Below is the overview of Yahoo web analytics. Have a look on it