How to set up Republican and Democratic segments in Google Analytics

Heads up: This article references Politweets, a Whole Whale product that has been deprecated. For our current tools and offerings, visit our Products page.

The nonprofit and advocacy sector needs a strong understanding of how our issue-focused content is reaching and resonating with the audiences it needs to reach. The content Filter Bubble, an issue identified by Eli Parser, continues to isolate information in pockets on the web based on users’ interests and browsing habits. These bubbles are especially pronounced across political ideologies. So how can you tell if your message is reaching across party lines?

How to Identify Republican and Democratic Segments in Google Analytics

Whole Whale took the time to create a state map based on the 2016 Presidential election results that will in turn segment Democrat and Republican sectors for nonprofits to use in your Google Analytics account. Our goal is to help organizations better understand if their content and marketing is disproportionately resonating with the political left or right. Note that we were only able to drill down the data by state and not district due to a limitation in Google Analytics’s geotargeting interface. Here are the 3 easy steps to setting up Republican and Democratic segments of your traffic in Google Analytics:

Step 1

Copy the following segments into your Google Analytics account: U.S. Republican State Map 2016 Segment U.S. Democratic State Map 2016 Segment

Step 2

Go to one of the views in your Google Analytics account, like Behavior or Audience and then select these two segments. Remember to also remove the All Users segment to see a clean view of Republican state vs Democratic state traffic.

Step 3

Explore! What do you learn by answering the following questions:

How do traffic sources differ?
How do the top 5 inbound search terms (paid/unpaid) differ?
Which audience has a higher bounce rate and lower time on site?
How do the conversion rates differ?

The big question we hope this helps you answer is whether this reveals a bias in your content and cause. Regardless of the answer, ask yourself: Is that intentional? If we expect our elected officials to reach across the aisle, shouldn’t we take a moment to see if we are making the same effort with our content?

How to get your representatives to take notice

Interested in making it easier to share your content with U.S. Representatives? Check out Politweets by Whole Whale, an embeddable widget that allows you to pre-craft messages that your supporters can then Tweet to their representatives.