Web Performance Could Help Elect the Next U.S. President

Could the 2008 presidential election be influenced by the candidates' Web sites?and in particular, those sites' ability to process online donations? A report released on Wednesday by Gomez Inc., a company specializing in Web-site performance measurement, would seem to suggest it might be. According to an online poll of prospective voters conducted last week and sponsored by Lexington, Mass.-based Gomez, some 43% have visited or plan to visit a candidate site. Of these, 57% have made a donation at the site or plan to. The sites' ability to handle these payments may play a key role in how well the candidates do at the ballot box. Sixty-two percent said they'd stop trying to make a payment if the process failed twice, with most noting they'd try again at a later date. Two-thirds said they'd tell others if the donation process failed, with 42% of this group saying they'd tell three to five people. “This significant word-of-mouth factor should not be underestimated by candidates who are relying on their Web sites as a critical and ongoing channel of communication and fundraising,” Gomez says in a news release. “In e-commerce, it's 'three strikes and you're out,' resulting in lost revenue. Hence, the imperative that the online donation process must work quickly and effectively the first time.” Gomez also reported that leading fundraiser Sen. Hillary Clinton is also the digital frontrunner so far. Her site logged the fastest payment-processing time (3.312 seconds) among all the candidate sites, as measured in the final days of the first quarter. By contrast, the site belonging to Clinton's chief rival for the Democratic nomination, Sen, Barack Obama, came in 10 times slower. The fastest Republican site for payments is that of former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee, at 3.486 seconds. If the Gomez poll is accurate, this presidential campaign may well be the first to turn, at least in part, on Web-site performance. Of the respondents who had visited candidate sites, 58% told Gomez the winner of the 2008 race is likely to be the one who has the best-performing site. The survey was conducted for Gomez by Zoomerang, an online market-research company, and relied on a demographically representative sample of the U.S. population.