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.

Obama.com: Not What You Think!

It’s still a reasonable assumption that a major organization’s Web site should be its name followed by .com or another relevant suffix. It’s true enough, anyway, that one can usually skip the search engine and guess a big company’s Web site on the first attempt.

Not so for anyone who goes to www.obama.com expecting a dose of change he or she can believe in. My colleague Andy Bouvé at Slate V noticed yesterday that this domain directs the user to a Japanese site registered to a Satoru Obama in Fukuoka, which is in southwest Japan. (The registration actually lists both "Satoru Obama" and "Obama Satoru.")

An auto-translation of the site strongly suggests it’s just a generic default page, with advertisements for loans, insurance, and hair transplants. Saturo has not responded to my email asking whether the Obama campaign has attempted to buy the domain name.

This would be nothing more than novelty but for the fact that, according the Web analytics company Compete.com, nearly 140,000 people visited Obama.com in February. After a dropoff in traffic in the spring, Obama.com rebounded with over 100,000 visitors last month.

By way of comparison, that makes Obama.com more popular than my hometown newspaper, the Daily Progress.

It doesn’t help the Obama campaign that commenters on online forums frequently implore fellow readers to "Go to Obama.com" to read more about the candidate. Sure, no one is going to mistake this site for official Obama campaign content. But how many of those 140,000 people had planned to donate $25 but got confused by their browser’s mangling of the Kanji font? It may not be insignificant.