Abbott and Gillard’s online marketing war

YouTube

Video for campaign advertising, policy distribution and general announcements is quite popular on the YouTube channels of each of the parties. Here is a breakdown of the stats.

The Liberals have prevented people viewing their statistics on their videos. Labor has kept them open which would allow Liberal to reverse engineer all of the places that Labor is getting views for its videos and ensure that Liberal are being seen in the same places.

Websites

Traffic:
Labor has slightly more traffic going to their website although people look at slightly more pages per visit on the Liberal website. People spend a similar amount of time on each site and both parties are reaching a similar sized audience.

Usability and design:

Both of the party websites are easy to use and nicely designed.

Key points:

• Great integration of video from both sites.
• Good solid call to actions.
• Easy to use search functionality.
• Good integration with social media tools.

Mistakes:

• Liberal have called their YouTube channel liberal.tv although have not registered that domain name and a domain camper has registered the domain. At present LiberalParty.tv is being squatted on by an Australian company and they might be able to acquire this to make it a brandable, campaignable URL they could use into the future.
• Fear sites could be used to rank in natural search if they were better optimised and linked to from the huge number of sites that each party run or are involved with.

Final Prediction

Liberal have a slightly better online marketing campaign running, although Labor is more popular online.

Fred Schebesta is an online marketing expert and the founder of Credit Card Finder, Home Loan Finder  and Savings Account Finder. You can follow him on Twitter: @schebesta.