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Water Shortage - Key Issue in Victorian State Election

November 17, 2006

As the Victorian State election nears it's been acknowledged by political leaders that tackling water shortage is a key election issue. The Hitwise Search Term chart below shows how quickly this issue has risen amongst the minds of online users and voters - it's interesting to note that 'water tanks' attracted higher volumes of traffic than did 'desalination' as a possible solution.

Australian Share of Searches

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An important piece that's missing in the campaigns leading up to the election is where users land online after entering these search terms. As the Victorian branches of the Greens, Liberals and ALP parties make their bid on the most effective solution on water shortage, users are meanwhile directed to other websites. The table below shows that searches for 'water tanks' are being directly primarily to commercial websites, while searches on 'desalination' has more success in going to Government rather than opposing parties.

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As water shortage and similar issues such as climate change pick up in the consciousness of the population, political parties have the opportunity to monitor and respond to this momentum through targeted content and well-optimised sites for search engine listings.

Posted by Sandra Hanchard at 06:28 PM | (2) | (0)
In Categories Politics

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Comments

Hi, this is very interesting (regarding salination) however I find it unusual that there was no category for science or technology in there. Is that what was implied by "reference"?

Posted by Dejan Petrovic | November 28, 2006 11:07 AM

Hi there Dejan, yes we do categorise science and technology oriented-websites into "Reference", a sub-category of "Education".

The two most popular websites receiving traffic from 'desalination' were www.wikipedia.org (22.94%) and www.abc.net.au/science (16.51%) for 4 weeks ending 25/11/06. So it does indeed look like consumers are looking for scientific information.

Posted by Sandra Hanchard | November 28, 2006 11:32 AM

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