Data Wars: DNC vs RNC
BY Micah L. Sifry | Tuesday, October 23 2007
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." (The winner, by an overwhelming margin, was Hillary Clinton.)
But Josh McConaha, the Democratic National Committee's internet director, isn't impressed by these numbers. He compared the RNC's latest push to a recent online letter-writing campaign the DNC did around the S-Chip bill, and his numbers suggest the Democrats are still way ahead of the Republicans in the online engagement game. He told me:
On our SCHIP work, the most recent we've done, the DNC had roughly 68,000 letter writers on 120,000 page views (114,000 were on the launch day if we want to compare it to the RNC). We required users not only to know their zip+4, but to write their own letter and fill out a long form of information. Even with all the required information, our bounce rate was only 43% (which is high, but not for needing that level of information).
[Bounce rate refers to the number of visitors who come to a webpage, but fail to do anything.]
The RNC has 9,000 voters on 65,000 launch-day page views. They require only first, last, email and zip -- the most basic information you can ask for. They had an 86% bounce rate.
Our list stands at about 3.5 million people; the RNC has, if I remember correctly, claimed around 7 million (the difference is largely due to buying email appends to voter files in 2004).
So if you email 7 million people and 9,000 people respond, you've only got a .12% response rate.
If you email 3.5 million and 68,000 people respond, you've got a 1.94% response rate -- a little over 16 times better.
It's not totally fair to compare same-day stats with overall stats, but 95% of all action happens on launch day (which is clear given our page view numbers on SCHIP). So, let's just say that the RNC will see another 6,000 votes, bringing them to 15,000 overall (60% day of, 40% after -- even though the real numbers are 95 and 5). Their push, which they're actively bragging about to the media, was only 22% of what our last push was -- and that's spotting them an unrealistic increase in post-launch traffic and a list that's double the size. Divide for their list size, and their thing was 11% as effective as our last thing, and probably far less so if you took into account the amount of effort required by the user.
This isn't the first time, by the way, that a DNC email campaign has generated impressive numbers. Back in early September, McConaha told me that they emailed their entire list asking people to use their PartyBuilder tool to start county-level chapters, and produced a 25% increase in local groups--more than 800 ones--in 48 hours.
I've emailed Cyrus Krohn asking him for his comment on these numbers (and coincidentally enough I'm going to be on a panel with him and McConaha tomorrow!). Stay tuned.