Though
not a traditional e-commerce retailer, the Obama-Biden 2012 campaign is the
most successful uses of Google Analytics (GA) in the history of politics.
Though the campaign did offer a delightful online store with well-designed and
clever merchandise (I still own a “cup of Joe” mug with Vice President Biden’s
photo on it), the real product for sale was the Obama for America (OFA)
brand. In the course of the 2012
election, the Obama campaign raised $733M in donations from 4.4M individual
donors, the majority of whom donated $200 or less to the campaign—a stark
contrast to the Romney campaign that raised $479M from 1.1M donors, the majority
of whom donated $2000 or more (Washington Post, 2012) . Through a
sophisticated use of both data analytics and digital analytics – the campaign
had two separate analytics branches in the organization focused on different
uses of data – voters were targeted with specifically crafted email messages
asking for small amounts of money, often “just $3,” to not only fundraise but
to earn the allegiance of their visitors (Engage Research, 2013) . For a relatively
small personal donation, the campaign’s consumers could feel fully engaged with
the Obama brand. This engagement would translate into brand loyalty and
consequent votes on election day. Using both traditional product marketing
strategies and unconventional applications of e-commerce techniques, the OFA
team created a dynamic and responsive marketing campaign for a winning
political platform.
To
cover the entire breakdown of the Obama 2012 analytics techniques is far beyond
the scope of this blog post, however, the OFA campaign’s use of GA to enhance
their digital analytics, and particularly their real-time responsiveness ans
optimization is a masterful ecommerce strategy that could be replicated by any
fundra ising or highly visible enterprise to continuously engage customers.
Hey.
If
you in any way aligned yourself with the Democratic National Committee, or the
Obama campaign, you were added to the OFA email list. Jon Stewart may have
poked fun on The Daily Show about the
voluminous quantity of email sent on a daily basis from the campaign but these
emails were not simply designed to wear d own a contributor’s resistance. They
were also the result of a complex A/B testing process and GA event tracking to
determine which subject lines prompted opening the emails and clicking through
to the website. According to Amelia Showalter, OFA Director of Digital
Analytics, “We did extensive testing not just on the subject lines and the
amount of money we would ask people for but on the messages themselves and even
the formatting.” The campaign would test
as many as 18 variations before selecting a version to send to its massive
email list.
The most popular
subject line? “Hey.” The casual and familiar tone encouraged recipients to open
the email. Additionally, staffers reported that their instincts were
practically useless when designing email blasts. “We were so bad at predicting
what would win that it only reinforced the need to constantly keep testing. Every
time something really ugly won, it would shock me: giant-size fonts for links,
plain-text links vs. pretty ‘Donate’ buttons. Eventually we got to thinking ,
‘How could we make things even less attractive?’ That’s how we arrived at the
ugly yellow highlighting on the sections we wanted to draw people’s eye to,” according
to Showalter. A/B testing proved to be the reliable measure of potential
success. The extrapolated monetary difference
between versions could add up to millions of dollars from a single email blast (Green, 2012) .
Secondary Calls to Action and Ease of
Re-Donating
After
an initial signup, the digital analytics team used GA Advanced Segmentation and
Flow Visu alization features to determine the best way to reengage their
audience and craft messaging for these segments. The digital analytics team
used these tools to test the efficacy of sharing on social media as well as
measuring what messages resonated with particular audiences. The result was
continuous optimization in response to the content that proved most resonant
with existing subscribers (Google Analytics, 2013) .
Additionally,
the digital analytics team continually tested the efficacy of their donation
pages. By observing donor behavior and bounce rates, the campaign was able to
reformat the donation pages, conduct A/B tests and raise their conversion rates
by 49%. Additionally, by merely increasing the load speed of the donation pages
by 60%, the team saw a 14% increase in donations. By simply monitoring user
behavior on pages and noting where users dropped off in the funnel results, the
team enabled the campaign to maximize supporter donations (Engage Research, 2013) .
Binders Full of Women
The
OFA campaign anticipated that a significant majority (64%) of viewers utilize
the internet to fact check statements made during presidential and
vice-presidential debates. Though the digital analyt ics team anticipated many
of the potential searches, not all of them could be foreseen. Many quotable
moments are created during the course of a broadcast, so the digital analytics
team generated real-time reports in GA to a) identify new organic search terms,
and b) create and place relevant ads in the search results for these terms. During
the second presidential debate Governor Mitt Romney uttered this unfortunate
statement:
“And I—and I went to my
staff, and I said, ‘How come all the people for these jobs are—are all men.’
They said: ‘Well, these are the people that have the qualifications.’ And I
said: ‘Well, gosh, can't we—can't we find some—some women that are also
qualified?’ And—and so we—we took a concerted effort to go out and find women
who had backgrounds that could be qualified to become members of our cabinet. I
went to a number of women's groups and said: ‘Can you help us find folks,’ and
they brought us whole binders full of women,”
In
response, the OFA campaign was able to create immediate targeted keyword
advertising focusing on the President’s achievements in equal rights
legislation running alongside the search results for “binders full of women” (Google Analytics, 2013) .
Get Out the Vote
One
of the most innovative uses of GA during the campaign was the Get Out the Vote
effort as election day drew near. OFA used GA to allow the entire team to view
the results of advertising and website data to empower rapid decision-making in
the final days of the campaign . The team utilized the Google Analytics API and
scripts to automate their reporting of marketing efforts in various channels,
with a specific emphasis on geo-targeting accuracy. A very useful features of
the OFA site in both the desktop and mobile versions was the polling place
lookup feature. By cus tomizing the GA reports, the digital analyt ics team could
determine whether voters were being directed accurately, and specifically
whether their location was in a high priority area for the campaign. If the
lookup feature wasn’t performing as expected or desired, it could be adjusted
on the fly for more precise results (Google Analytics, 2013) .
Additionally, the campaign spent millions on Get Out the Vote election ads on
mobile devices, targeting down to a
neighborhood level young, female, and Hispanic voters to ensure that the
OFA campaign was maximizing voter turnout (Heine, 2012) .
In Summary
Everyone
knows how the story ends, but not the analytics that contributed to making that
ending a reality. By engaging voters to be part of the solution through responsiveness
and real-time optimization driven by advanced GA features, the OFA digital
analytics team was able to better understand their consumer/voter and provide
the appropriate opportunities and incentives to engage with the campaign brand.
References
Engage Research.
(2013). Inside the Cave: An In-Depth Look at the Digital, Technology, and
Analytics Operations of Obama for America . Alexandria, VA: Engage
Research.
Google Analytics. (2013). Obama for America uses
Google Analytics to democratize rapid, data-driven decision making.
Mountain View, CA: Google Analytics.
Green, J. (2012, Nov 29). The
Science Behind Those Obama Campaign Emails. Retrieved Dec 7, 2014, from
Bloomberg Businessweek: http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2012-11-29/the-science-behind-those-obama-campaign-e-mails
Heine, C. (2012, Dec 18). Here's
One Advertiser Who Swears Mobile Ads Work: Obama. Retrieved Dec 7, 2014,
from AdWeek: http://www.adweek.com/news/technology/heres-one-advertiser-who-swears-mobile-ads-work-obama-146044
Washington Post. (2012, Dec 7). 2012
Presidential Campaign Finance Explorer. Retrieved Dec 8, 2014, from
Washington Post: Campaign 2012:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/special/politics/campaign-finance/
No comments:
Post a Comment