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Indian general election 2019 results are going to be declared soon. Maybe, you would be reading this article when the results have already been announced. But, did you know?, how the top Indian political parties like BJP and Congress used Online/Internet media to reach people for getting a vote in their favor?
With BJP investing approximately 23 crores and Congress touching only 5 crores to appeal for a vote in this years election, it is important to study and know, what strategies, these parties used to influence the voters across the India.
In this article, we will dig out all data and statistics scraped from various tools to check, how smart are these political parties IT Cell, to build their vote campaign online. We would be focusing on the two most favored and big political parties. They are Bhartiya Janta Party(BJP) and Indian National Congress (INC).
So, what we are focusing on figuring out these Indian political parties smartness?
Table of Contents
What marketing secrets will be disclosed in this article about these political parties?
To reveal these parties marketing strategy for running online vote campaign, We will be checking data like
- What amount of traffic, these parties website received, during these campaign months? A huge surge would clear many stories.
- Did these political parties invest money in running paid campaign online? The article column will clear the money invested and the methods used to reach people online for vote appeal.
- Which Online social platforms were used as the most profitable channel for promoting their vote campaign online? The article will reveal, where were these political parties more active in the online space.
So let’s break all questions into answers and understand the online story of Indian Political parties.
Website traffic revealing the online vote campaign.
We were shocked looking at the sudden surge in the website traffic of both these political parties. If we don’t go too technical and explain you in a simple language then we can say that website traffic i.e the number of people visiting a web address cannot see a certain surge in number until and unless
- It posts something that has the potential to get viral through online shares.
- It runs advertisement about itself in terms of product or services or just a casual promotion with a huge advertising budget being paid to the online advertising networks like Google, facebooks, etc.
- The website has a bot attack.
Do you know some other ways through which, you can surge the website traffic suddenly or over a short period of time? If so, do let everyone know in the comment section below, we will update that in this article.
Overview of BJP Website Traffic during the election campaign period.
Website traffic is best analyzed using Google analytics. It gives you an exact number of total visitors who visited a particular website but the access to google analytics is only with the website webmaster or web owner.
Even though you can’t get access to other website’s google analytics data directly, still there are other tools that help you predict and understand the total website visitors they are getting.
We have used a free tool called similar web to identify the traffic surge of BJP’s Official website. (We are using a free tool so that you can cross-check the authenticity of data that we are sharing with you). This is important to note that BJP had run multiple online campaigns with many other websites under their name.
We will focus on BJP official website first.
If you really want to dive in deep into how these big political parties have tried reaching the Indian population through online media, the psychological approach they adopted in reaching the Indian voters then you will have to read this article till the end. Let’s Go ahead and know more.
From the above pictorial data representation, it is quite clear that the BJP website has received a sudden spike of visitors from Feb 2019 till today. This data is approx data from an online tool called similar webs but the surge is near to the exact values.
We tried digging out deeper into the traffic source. Traffic source means the channels through which the visitors landed to the official website of BJP.
The above data reveal following things to understand
- Direct Traffic: These are those website visitors who came to BJP’s Official website directly by typing their url on the browser. 37.05% of the website visitors came directly (April 2019 data). They were not influenced by any display ads, video ads or email inbox.
- Referral Traffic: These are those sets of visitors who were actually reading something else on a different website or blog ( Excluding social media ) and clicked on any word and landed to bjp official website. This comprises of 4.72% of total April visitors.
- Search Traffic: Search traffic are those website visitors who searched something on search engine like Google and landed to BJP website. 43.91% Of the total web traffic came from search engine.
- Social Traffic: Website visitors who were on social media website but they got encountered with a social media ad or post, clicked on that and landed on BJP website. Nearly 13.79% of the traffic came from Social media.
- Mail: For the official website of BJP, ONLY 0.5% Of the website visitors came after reading email inbox.
That was just to explain to you the metrics in the above pictorial data. what we want you to identify is that BJP Official website had its presence everywhere in online channels.
We all are quite aware that all top leaders from BJP are highly active on Twitter hence BJP’s official website social visit is shared maximum by twitter.
BJP Official website vote influence verdict
The good point about BJP Official website is that, it has not tried to advertise or influence people through internet paid media too aggressively when we compare it to congress party online vote campaign.
We will justify this in the article as you go ahead in reading. So, don’t come to conclusion at this point because you must note that BJP has not used its official website as the main weapon, unlike Congress. BJP has many other websites and unofficial social media pages through which they targeted the Indian voters to cast vote in their favor and also did paid marketing.
Overview of Congress (INC) Website Traffic during the election campaign period.
Right now, our focus is only on the official website traffic data. As we have already studied the BJP’s official website statistics and concluded that their official website was not used as the weapon to do aggressive internet marketing. But we also have data that is explained at the end of this article, revealing the aggressive online marketing of BJP for vote influence for the 2019 election.
Let’s us study the website traffic surge of INC official website during the vote campaign for 2019
The traffic overview shows that Congress official website observes the website traffic surge from the month of March, that was one month late when compared to BJP surges.
But, the traffic compared to bjp website is too huge. Congress official website touched approx million visitors while Bjp official website didn’t even saw it in millions. We already have confirmed that BJP has not used its official website as their digital marketing weapon. Keep your reading interest high as the best secrets are yet to reveal in this article below.
As we have already told you, different website traffic sources of BJP’s official website, similar is the case with Congress’ official website But here one major insight has to be understood by Indian voters.
Congress has used its official website for aggressive online marketing for vote appeal influence.
If you see the Congress website traffic source pictorial data, there is a section with the name Display. Let us zoom in that section for clarity.
Congress has not only used the Google display networks to influence the Indian voters to vote in their favor but also used other networks like popads, zedo, etc. Check out the ads network distribution below that was used by Congress to reach Indian citizens.
To explain the above pictorial data in simple language, this confirms that Congress had invested a huge sum of money into advertising on high traffic website with their banner and display ads on big websites like
- Youtube
- Times of India website.
- Amar Ujala website.
- Ndtv website
If you follow Indian politics and Indian political activities often, you also use youtube very frequently then you must be aware that both BJP and Congress were found on youtube’s homepage advertisement block which is known as the masthead.
The cost of booking a date for advertising on youtube masthead is approx 45 lakhs to 50 lakhs for one day. So, you can approximate the investment that these big political parties are funding to influence the Indian voters.
Congress Official website vote influence verdict
Unlike BJP, Which has not used its official website for aggressive online marketing to influence the Indian voters, Congress on the other had used its official website as the primary landing page for all its online marketing campaign.
We went deep into the congress website’s backend code and figured out that they are tracking their website visitors by storing their cookies to retarget them on other platforms like youtube and facebook with the help of facebook pixel codes and Google’s remarketing codes. The marketing team of Congress used all aggressive technique to reach the online Indian voters using their official website.
Comparing BJP and Congress website traffic surge during election vote campaign.
Now that we have seen an individual report about the website traffic surge of both the big political parties official website during the campaign months. So, it’s time to compare, who received the maximum online push.
It is quite evident that Congress official website has received a huge footfall on the official website as compared to BJP but wait;
This was just half of the movie. As we already confirmed that BJP didn’t use its official website as the landing page for all its online marketing campaign, therefore, we must understand, how smartly did BJP reached the Indian voter and influenced the people for 2019 elections.
BJP Used a ton of other unofficial websites to appeal for a vote. For example, they used https://www.narendramodi.in/ website for some of their Google ads campaign and facebook ads campaign. Later in this article, we will disclose the exact budget invested by these parties for online marketing.
We checked the data and targeting method used with the narendramodi.in website and found some smart targeting methods used by BJP marketers.
From the above pictorial data, it is revealed that BJP had focused more on appealing for votes from the youth of India. Their banner/display ads were mostly seen on Sarkari Naukri type of website were the crowd comprises of unemployed youth or those youth who are working hard to get a government job in India.
Unlike congress which used multiple ads network to influence the Indian voter, BJP focus majorly on Google ads network to appeal for vote.
BJP Banner ads as seen on some of the Google’s partnered websites.
These vote appealing banner ads were captured by us, a few days back where we found that the narendramodi.in was used as a landing page to these banner ads.
Let us study the total amount spent by BJP and Congress in advertising on big online ads channel like Google and Facebook.
BJP & Congress online advertisement Investments.
We exploited two main sources to identify the money invested by these two big political parties
- Google’s transparency report
- Facebook Ads Library
Google transparency Report on Political advertisement on Google
Google recently updated the Net revenue that various organization across the India spent on Google ads for promoting them on google’s partnered network.
We were shocked to see that both BJP and Congress have overtaken the advertising arena and leading the list of advertisers.
BJP Toped the list with total ₹183,183,000 with 12,014 ad copies spread across google channels. That is 18 crore on 12k ads.
Congress party doesn’t top the list in advertiser with the highest advertising budget on Google. There is a very obvious reason for it. Because Congress marketers not only used the Google’s ad network but also exploited other ads network that we already revealed in the article above.
So, are you interested in knowing the amount spent by Congress on google ads? Congress spent 3 crore INR on google ads.
We found that Congress only invested 1/6th of what the BJP Party did for influencing the voters. As a marketer, we won’t consider it a healthy competition displayed by Congress to beat BJP Digitally.
Lets talk about the money spent by these parties on Facebook advertising.
Facebook Ads Library Report on Political advertisement on Facebook.
Again, in the next big online battlefield, BJP marketers defeated Congress party in running vote appeal campaign.
BJP spent approx 4.3 crores on Facebook ads with 2800+ ads copies that ran on Facebook targeting all Indians meanwhile congress spent only 1.8 crores but with more ads copies (3700 ad copies) as compared to BJP, Click to see full report
This online competition for vote appeal for the 2019 election between BJP and Congress saw a huge gap. Where BJP was investing huge money online, Congress party seems to be hesitant in reaching the online Indian Voters.
Snehiltalks Overview On this Digital war.
We had in depth and comprehensive study on these political parties online channels. Since the article would have gone out of the scope of general Indian readers hence we kept the article as simple as possible to be understood and consumed by all Indian readers, political readers, digital marketers and enthusiasts.
Our main motto was to let the Indian citizen know that the next generation of Indian political system is ready to go online and political parties understand the importance of being online. The Indian crowd is more intelligent than before and the internet has made everything quite easy to approach and understand. With big online companies like Google and Facebook going so transparent after the US election turmoil, it had help economies like us to be more protective with online activities. We hope that you loved the data that we shared with you.
This article doesn’t mean to discourage any political interest of any Citizen of India and we respect all political sentiments and parties of India.
Do let us know anything you want to share with us in the comment section below.
