techPresident - Data Wars: DNC vs RNC - Comments

Response from RNC

cyrusk — Fri, 26 Oct 2007 10:05:12 -0400

I’m pleased to see the DNC has taken such interest in the RNC’s web efforts. The RNC web team is going to continue experimenting and assessing what works and what doesn’t, as all web practitioners should. We’re still in the infancy of this medium and nobody has mastered the web yet – not even Google.

I understand the risks associated with sharing web statistics publicly because they invite the type of analysis Josh offered. Since we stated our figures at 4 p.m. day of launch that was all Josh had to work with--but keep a few things in mind. The Halloween contest launched at 9 a.m. ET so he was only working off of 7 hours of stats. I believe the DNC’s stats for their SCHIP work were based on a full day, so let me revisit our Halloween program now that we have 24 hours of data. After exactly 24 hours, scaredem.com generated more page views than the DNC’s SCHIP project and acquired over twice as many registrants as was cited in our initial media outreach. Josh’s projections weren’t far off, but the raw numbers he based his calculations on were not accurate. I won’t divulge the size of our list but it’s larger than the DNC’s (thanks Josh!). Maybe that should be our next web game – guess the size of our list.

I’d caution anyone against using this one event to be the determinant in assessing our online engagement. There are several other metrics associated with this particular program worth taking into account to gauge the value of our effort. For instance, how did our media and blog outreach impact additional traffic to the site? How many new visitors did the aforementioned attract to gop.com and what was the engagement rate of that new audience?

I will tell you that over the 36 hours following the release of our Halloween project, we attracted over one hundred thousand new visitors to the site and 68% of that audience viewed 3 or more pages. We introduced new readers to our web site and they consumed a respectable amount of content. More importantly in the context of this thread, those users chose to sign up for our e-mail alerts, generating over 50,000 new e-mail addresses above and beyond the 16,000 addresses we acquired from the contest, bringing our daily total of new addresses to over 66,000. According to Josh, the DNC generated roughly 68,000 letters from a pre-existing audience which didn’t really speak to or attract new “customers”. As Micah titled his piece “Data Wars”, I’d say this thread illustrates we have many battles ahead of us. But I’m claiming victory in the Halloween vs. SCHIP exchange and I look forward to seeing who wins the “Data War” on the condition we continue to conduct civil discourse over analytics.

Onward & Upward.

Cyrus Krohn
eCampaign Director
Republican National Committee

Totally agree...

mcconahaj — Wed, 24 Oct 2007 11:04:27 -0400

It is apples and oranges. The RNC process is much simpler than the DNC process for what we're comparing. There was 1) vote and 2) give your email address. The DNC had...

1) Give a form of your address or zip+4 (because of traffic, the geocoding process gives way to making people use the USPS lookup, so that's 1.5)

2) The same fields as the RNC, plus full address

3) User-supplied subject and fully body (no defaults)

4) Preview and send

But if we're looking at past campaigns and 80,000 is the best number, then the multiple 100,000+ campaigns or the 250,000+ campaign we did on Path to 9/11 and ABC should come into the mix.

"Viral" is a matter of context, I suppose. It probably went viral in page views, which is why the bounce rate is so high, but even as by "going viral" it still underperformed compared to an average send for the DNC. And if it did go viral, then the RNC list performed even worse than the math shows -- how much worse depends on just how viral.

Let's suppose the bounce rates for the two lists were equal and that all action came from the email list -- 43% bounced for the DNC just from email, 43% bounced from the RNC just from email. That means that there were only 21,000 page views from RNC list, versus 120,000 for the DNC. With those numbers, it's a 0.3% click-through rate for the RNC and a 3.4% click-through rate for the DNC -- over 11 times better. But we know those page view numbers aren't accurate on either side, simply because there's always some amount of "viral" to everything...it's just what we have to work with.

So let's look at the value of "viral" -- new names. My experience has been that new names range from 20% to 40% of all action takers (but it can range to either side of that). Let's give the DNC the low end -- 20%. Let's give the RNC the high end -- 40%. That means that the DNC had 13,600 new names and the RNC had 3,600 new names. In other words, given a 20% difference in new names, the DNC still had just under 4 times as many new names as the RNC's "viral" campaign did.

Without more data it makes it educated speculation, but if the argument is that the RNC's was easier and it also went viral, then it would mean that the list performed even more poorly than the original calculations.

Apples and Oranges...

Patrick Ruffini — Wed, 24 Oct 2007 02:47:22 -0400

The difference here is more easily explained by the different sign on processes. The RNC application is a two page process in which you:

1) Vote
2) Give your email address

Is the higher "bounce" rate anything more than natural attrition you'd experience on a secondary page? Especially since when you land on the page, it says, "You have selected Hillary Clinton" or whomever in big type, followed by a request for an email address in smaller type? People might have missed the request, or given that the results are posted before you vote, figure it's not worth the hassle to give your address.

When I was at the RNC, a similar survey action generated more than 80,000 votes with a very low bounce rate. (Actually, this was a more intensive, multi-question survey.) However, a key difference was that we did not require someone we knew to be on our list to give their email address to vote. It was a one-step process for most people. So our action rate was higher as a result.

The key though is that the RNC has built something viral and worth talking about in the press. Because it wasn't a standard, cookie-cutter, issue-based call to action, it attracted attention beyond the email list. I'd be willing to bet that most of the people who signed up were new to the RNC.

How many people who signed the DNC call to action were new to the DNC? Probably relatively few. It was probably the same people signing with the email address already on file, or the same people signing with a different email address.

Data Wars: DNC vs RNC

Micah L. Sifry — Tue, 23 Oct 2007 23:35:09 -0400

The Republican National Committee just launched a new online game called Scariest Democrat, a Halloween-themed contest attacking the Democratic presidential field that invites visitors to "click on the Scariest Democrat." Complete with creepy sound-effects, the site drew 65,000 visitors by 4pm on its first day, and RNC e-campaign manager Cyrus Krohn told Marc Ambinder that "nearly 9,000 people had spent the time to give the RNC their e-mail address in order to vote." But DNC internet director Josh McConaha isn't impressed by the RNC's numbers, and points to the Dems' recent online campaign for S-Chip that, he says, was as much as 16 times as effective at mobilizing supporters.