Trailhead: A campaign blog.

Missed Connections at Obama.com

As we mentioned yesterday, thousands of people every month are visiting Obama.com expecting to find Barack Obama's campaign website. Instead, they find a Japanese site full of links for loans and hair transplants. 

Thanks to the Web analytics firm Compete, we can begin to get an idea of how many eyeballs this is costing the Obama campaign. Compete provided Slate with "downstream" data--where people went after visiting Obama.com--for the 100,000-plus people who visited the site in June of the year:

• 21 percent went directly BarackObama.com.
• 40 percent went to a search engine.
• 17 percent tried another incorrect URL for Obama's site.
• 22 percent gave up and went elsewhere.

Of those 17 percent who took a second guess and failed, barakobama.com and barrackobama.com were the biggest attractions, both of which redirect to a Google search for the correct spelling of Obama's name. Obama.org and Obamma.com also show up.

As Slate's Paul Boutin has written before, Web analytics data is fungible. (Just ask Google.) But we can safely assume from these numbers that a failure to proactively register a wide variety of misspellings and alternate URLs is costing the campaign tens of thousands of page views a month. I presume that neither campaign needs my advice that every page view counts.