April 22, 2008

London Mayoral elections: what does the Internet data say?

A lot has been made about how the candidates and voters for the London Mayoral elections on May 1st have embraced the Internet like never before - at least in British political terms, as this is one area where the US remains well ahead of us Brits. So, how are the candidates doing online? The first place to look is search data; specifically, how does each candidate’s name rank as a search term.

As you can see from the chart above, the Conservative candidate Boris Johnson was ahead last week, and has been for most of the campaign. Labour’s Ken Livingstone has been in second place, but last week was overtaken the Liberal Democrat candidate, Brian Paddick. Of course, it is important to state that searches do not equal votes – voters will be searching for their least favourite as well as their favourite candidate – but looking where people end up when searching for a candidate can be informative.

As you would expect, the top destination for each of the candidates is their main homepage, particularly in the case of Lib Dem Brian Paddick. Wikipedia is the second most popular destination, and is particularly important for Tory Boris Johnson. News and Media sites are most important for Ken Livingstone searches. As the incumbent candidate, a number of searches for the mayor also lead to the official London Government website. Charting traffic to each of the candidates’ homepages, you can see that the ranking for last week is the same as the search terms, although the trend in each case is more clearly upward, and the gaps between candidates are smaller.

Of course, not only do searches not equal votes, but website visits don’t either! However, looking at the story behind these visits provides some more insight. For example, 49% of visitors to Boris’s website live outside of London, while Ken’s site sends the most visitors to election / voter registration websites. This week the Labour party homepage was the fifth most popular downstream site from Brian Paddick’s homepage, while last week Ken’s homepage was the second – data that may have an impact considering the potential importance of second preference votes.

The most popular site visited before Brian Paddick’s site last week was Facebook, which brings us back to the original claims about this being an Internet election. As you can see from the chart below, Brian Paddick is currently receiving the most traffic from social networks, and this has played a part in the growth of his homepage over the last couple of weeks. Boris has gained traction on the social networks as well: his Facebook group is the biggest, while YouTube was the most popular site visited after his homepage last week.

However, when you look at the number of interactions across the social networks, they are actually quite small for an election involving millions of voters. The widely reported ‘I Think I Fancy Boris’ YouTube video has, at time of writing, received less than 22,000 viewings, while the collective membership of the three candidates’ fanclubs / friendship lists on Facebook is just over 11,000. Although the Internet has clearly played a role in this election, it looks like its still early days for online political campaigning in the UK.

Update (April 30th): With one day of campaigning to go, we have provided the latest data.

Posted by Robin Goad at 09:00 AM
Posted to Demographics | Government | News and Media | Politics | Search | Social networks | Video

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Comments

Posted by: Tim Hurford at April 22, 2008 10:03 PM

Posted by: Robin Goad at April 23, 2008 08:10 AM

Posted by: Matt Wardman at April 27, 2008 02:22 PM

Posted by: Robin Goad at April 28, 2008 09:09 AM

Posted by: Matt Wardman at April 28, 2008 11:23 AM

Posted by: Robin Goad at April 30, 2008 10:36 AM

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