Voters Aide, a Google Analytics Event Tracking Report Example

By Evan Mullins | Published: 5 November 2008

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:

	Label	Total Events	Unique Events	Event Value	Avg. Value
1.	economy	70	60	5,258	75.11
2.	education	63	55	4,548	72.19
3.	iraq	46	37	3,220	70.00
4.	energy	67	57	4,579	68.34
5.	taxes	40	38	2,641	66.02
6.	homeland security	50	43	3,264	65.28
7.	health care	59	53	3,789	64.22
8.	afghanistan	64	47	4,068	63.56
9.	housing	50	39	3,125	62.50
10.	social security	33	29	2,009	60.88
11.	abortion	92	58	5,544	60.26
12.	environment	56	48	3,324	59.36
13.	iran	40	37	2,266	56.65
14.	free trade	41	36	2,224	54.24
15.	israel	38	36	2,048	53.89
16.	guns	49	42	2,461	50.22
17.	russia	31	25	1,550	50.00
18.	stem cell research	27	26	1,296	48.00
19.	LBGT	37	31	1,750	47.30
20.	immigration	38	33	1,749	46.03
21.	cuba	57	47	2,151	37.74

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.

	Label	Total Events	Unique Events	Event Value	Avg. Value
1.	supportmccain	26	24	1,545	59.42
2.	supportobama	23	19	1,435	62.39
3.	supportno	2	1	0	0.00

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.Â 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: