Voters Aide, a Google Analytics Event Tracking Report Example

Overview

Voters Aide – a little flash app I made in some spare time to help prioritize the issues and positions for the 2008 presidential election. The app would let uses assign a weight to each of the big issues (0 – 100), and then read each candidates positions on every issue and record to which candidate they leaned (0 -100). The app did all the math then. Simply multiply the weight by their leaning and total it up. So if on the economy (which was reported the heaviest weighted issue overall) you say it is a weight of 90 and you lean one way +25 then your economy position is calculated 25 x .9 toward that candidate (22.5). To get a better understanding of it even though the election is over, go ahead and run through it yourself. I copied the selection of top issues and each candidate’s position from CNN’s website. I even randomized which side each candidate would show up on and left them unmarked so no one would be prejudiced toward their candidate. I wanted uses actual positions and priorities to speak louder than their preconceived preference or bias. I know this is flawed because the candidates position descriptions often were dead a give away, even sometimes saying the candidates name. Ideally it’d be great to simplify the positions but I wasn’t about to try to summarize it all! =)

Now that the election is decided though, I wanted to share what else I learned with this app. I included my google analytics event tracking methods in the voters aide app. So to everyone that has been using the app, I was watching!

Results

I used event tracking to see what weight was applied to every issue, to see which way users leaned on every issue and of course their final calculations which told them who they support. The reports are interesting because they not only tell you how many people apply a weight to an issue, but also what value. They say not only how many users actually continued through each issue and stated which way they lean, but also how far they lean and who they lean to! Not only how many users actually completed voters aide to the final screen which shows their calculation, but also which candidate they supported in voters aide and even by how much!
The results were very interesting in the weights people used to prioritize the issues. Maybe that is because is is easier to visualize? But the issues were ranked in the following order:

Here is an example of the report for the most important issue, economy. It stats which candidate had the users support and even how many times and the average value.

I’ll go ahead and say, (although the app was not designed to predict the president or even considered your location, it just counted how many times it reported to users which candidate they leaned towards) according to Voters Aide, John McCain would have won the election.  So more people who used Voters Aide lean McCain in the end, once they get to the end of the issues. I’d have to add that this is a very small sample size and even if it were larger, I never tested the app for usability and user understanding, so the end result doesn’t mean that much in the end. But as you will be curious here is the report for the final page events:

Anyways, great election. I hope all this change will be a change for the better.

Congratulations to everyone who is excited about the future & condolences to everyone lamenting the end of the world.