After launching Cossette’s Interactive and Magnet Search Marketing services with great success, our Media president Pierre Delagrave would like to share with the rest of the world Magnet’s daily blog. This blogs’ purpose is to share search engine marketing (SEM) and search engine optimization (SEO) knowledge and help clients continuously upgrade their marketing offer.

For those who’ve already experienced it, launching a blog isn’t quite easy! A blog needs a great deal of work, consistent posts and the capability to help an industry innovate.
For years I’ve been reading and getting inspired from blogs edited from peers such as Éric Baillargeon, Adviso, Michèle Blanc, Ressac Media, NVI, Michael Carpentier, Stéphane Amel or Canalytics. Knowing that the science has been properly covered, it took me quite some time before deciding to launch a blog. The challenge; find a subject that hasn’t been treated before and that has informational added value.

After much thought, I chose to blog about the elections as my inaugural theme. The elections represent a topic that all can relate, whether they follow federal, provincial our even American elections.

As the 2008 Federal Elections were announced, Magnet was mandated to remind Canadians to go vote on the 14th of October by monitoring the keyword campaign. Under normal circumstances, we stick to optimizing and measuring keywords but this time around we decided to go beyond words and leverage the un-leverageble; modify the Google welcome page logo. Considering the importance of the Federal Elections, Google contributed to the cause by modifying the second O of GOOGLE with the campaigns logo.

As you could imagine, this historical moment needed to be tracked. I began by monitoring my traffic and isolating visitors who clicked on the Google home page placements.
Here is what the user encountered on Google.ca on the 14th of October:
1. The visitor lands on Google.ca
2. He see’s that the Google logo has been modified and decides to click on the banner
3. He then is redirected a elections Google results page were he can choose in-between “élections” in French or “elections” in English
4. The visitor can click on the first link and be redirected on elections.ca

In order to properly analyze the results I pulled and compared 2 Webtrends reports; Elections Day visits vs. daily average visits from October 7th to 14th. I also took into consideration Election Canada’s insight that traffic increases 6 to 7 time on Elections Day and eliminated the “extra” traffic from the report. I then subtracted all users that used 2 keyword searches to get to the site and quickly realized that my analysis was still incomplete; I needed to consider other external elements such as direct access to the site and visits generated from other Medias.

After a couple of discussions with the team, Alexandre Frantz, our in-house expert in Web analytics, brought to my attention that search phrases were a good way to differentiate queries. The results were astonishing: The keyword “Elections Canada” provided the most traffic, representing 21.63% of all user queries, from September 7th to October 14th. On Election Day, this keyword slightly decreased by -4.76%. Let’s take a look at the “elections” keyword (in grey). As impressive as it may seem, this keyword registered this campaigns’ biggest increase at 136.60%!

Overall, we discovered that the “elections” keyword is the word that drives the most traffic on Elections Day. This being a first, it was quite difficult to completely isolate the number of visitors that the logo change provided, but definitely played a significant role.

Once again, Google has left us wanting more!

I would like to thank the Elections Canada team who authorized the publication of these results.

Our next post will feature Google Analytics measurement, you can stay tuned by registering to our RSS feed.

This post was written by Sylvain