0 Shares

About

e.thePeople is a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization that is the nation’s leading provider of interactive voter guide software. Hundreds of news organizations and civic groups have used E.thePeople to provide in-depth online voter guides for local, state, and national elections, resulting in over 13 million interactions since 2004.

The Challenge

e.thePeople collaborated with TurboVote to distribute online voter guides ahead of the 2016 presidential election. The team needed to improve digital analytics to successfully track traffic and voter guide interaction throughout the campaign.

What we did

We split the project into two phases with Phase One in August 2016. Whole Whale configured Google Analytics with the tracking e.thePeople would need once the initiative launched. We moved into Phase Two following the election in November, diving in to glean insights about user behavior and engagement with the voter guides.

Phase 1: Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager Configuration

We configured Google Analytics views for more than 25 different voter guides, as well as a master cross-domain view that tracked users across guides. We created a Google Tag Manager account and configured events to better track voter guide interaction and then built custom Google Analytics dashboards to keep the team informed throughout the campaign. We also synced with TurboVote to campaign tag the guides they distributed.

Phase 2: Post Campaign Insight Report

After the campaign, we analyzed the massive amounts of voter guide traffic. On Election Day (November 8th, 2016), the voter guides received 585,000 sessions.

We analyzed how voter guide interaction varied across device type, geographic location, and demographics. We then compared behavior for voter guides distributed within the same city or region and segmented TurboVote traffic to identify how that traffic differed from other sources. Ultimately, we were able to provide the e.thePeople team with valuable insights into which voter guides had the best engagement and which types of users were most engaged. e.thePeople can use this analysis to inform voter guide creation and distribution in the future.