The first round of the presidential election is tomorrow, and its result will certainly be shaped in part by the candidates' online activities.
Jakub Gombár
AI Team Leader & Co-Founder
15. March 2019
5 min
BeginnerThe first round of the presidential election is tomorrow, and its result will certainly be shaped in part by the candidates' online activities. So we took a look at them…
A note:
We start with the classic — each candidate's website. The order is purely random. :-)
The most popular CMS is, by all appearances, WordPress. Six of our candidates use it. Milan Krajniak's site runs on Joomla, while Zuzana Čaputová and Béla Bugár have sites built bespoke with no recognisable CMS.
Every site is responsive. The HTTPS protocol for encrypting traffic while browsing is present on every candidate's site except naseslovensko.net, which is not encrypted.
The most commonly used tool for measuring site traffic is Google Analytics. Detailed analysis is available, once the Facebook Pixel is implemented, in the interface of the most-used social network too, and if we want to target ads at site visitors within YouTube or the Google Display Network, it is worth having the Google Ads remarketing code implemented on the site as well.
We found all three tracking codes only on Zuzana Čaputová's site. At the other end, Eduard Chmelár was the only candidate we looked at with no code implemented at all — the only one without even Google Analytics.
Using Majestic SEO we also ran a quick analysis of each candidate's link portfolio. The best results go to Marián Kotleba, who is, however, using his party's site for the campaign.
By volume of links, second place went to Maroš Šefčovič and third to Štefan Harabin. Looking at the number of domains linking to each candidate's site, the picture further down the table is more even.
By examining the transparent accounts we can establish relatively precisely how much each candidate invested in online campaigns. Not all of them paid campaign costs directly to Facebook or Google. In Maroš Šefčovič's case a payment of €80,000 to an online agency can be found, which probably includes media spending on online campaigns as well.
The influence of social media on voting preferences and results became a hot and still much-debated subject, particularly after the American presidential election and the British referendum. We can expect the choice of head of state here to be no exception, and that Facebook will have a large hand in the result. The candidates are aware of it too. On the transparent accounts of five of them we clearly identified almost €200,000 in payments for Facebook ads alone, the highest of them Zuzana Čaputová's. That does not mean the other candidates did not invest in Facebook advertising.
As a curiosity, going by our average figures for the last 6 months, Zuzana Čaputová could theoretically have won as many as 46,086,956 impressions of her ads on Facebook and Instagram.
Several candidates used video ads on YouTube and banner ads on the Google Display Network, though in the cases of Milan Krajniak and Maroš Šefčovič the payments did not come from the transparent account.
Beyond the standard paid online channels, we came across paid advertising in, for instance, Maroš Šefčovič's banner campaign through the Inres ad system, though we cannot pin down its scale.
Besides the size of the investment in Facebook and Instagram advertising, we also looked at other interesting metrics and at the networks the candidates were active on.
The strongest network by candidate presence is Facebook, used for self-presentation by all nine presidential candidates we included in our overview. All the candidates gathered 291,560 likes on their Facebook pages between them. Maroš Šefčovič and Béla Bugár even have verified pages marked with the blue badge denoting official profiles of well-known figures and brands.
Milan Krajniak entered the presidential contest of Facebook pages with the highest number of likes. Over time we can observe a rise in likes for every candidate:
Another interesting Facebook metric to compare is "people talking about", which expresses the sum of interactions with the page — commenting, sharing, liking and others — over the last 7 days.
We also looked more closely at the number and types of posts each candidate added to Facebook. The comparison below covers 1,592 candidate posts in total since the start of 2019.
An overview of posts for each candidate:
Seven of the nine candidates we followed did not forget Instagram. We found no active profiles for Eduard Chmelár or Marián Kotleba. Activity here was far lower than on Facebook, but rose sharply as the first round of the election approached, as the following chart shows:
On Instagram, Zuzana Čaputová wins on follower count once again, with a 66% share among the candidates. The second most active candidate on Instagram is Milan Krajniak.
A channel used even more than Instagram was YouTube, taken up by 8 of the 9 candidates we followed. Here our statistics are again "spoiled" by Marián Kotleba, who used two YouTube channels for his communication, both bearing the name of his parliamentary party.
On their channels the candidates published mainly videos from television and radio debates, from meetings with voters, or addresses to voters. But who uploaded the most videos, won the most subscribers and the most views?
Only Zuzana Čaputová used LinkedIn for active communication with prospective voters as well. On this professional network, with more than 500 million active users worldwide each month, we also found Maroš Šefčovič, Róbert Mistrík, Milan Krajniak and Marián Kotleba. The last two published no public posts. Maroš Šefčovič has the most followers on LinkedIn (almost 500,000), yet did not use the channel at all during the campaign.
Actively using online channels in a presidential campaign is a necessity today, and the candidates we followed have grasped it. The most prominent internet presence belongs to Zuzana Čaputová, whose team approached the online campaign very professionally — and with the largest budget. Štefan Harabin and Marián Kotleba also draw heavily on social media, with very active follower bases. We wish the candidates well in the election and are curious what presidential campaigns online will look like in 5 years' time.
sources: socialblade.com, zoomsphere.com, volby.transparency.sk, transparentneucty.sk, Facebook Public Data, Majestic SEO
Jakub Gombár
AI Team Leader & Co-Founder
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