Washington DC and Atlanta Top DMA® Markets for Obama Website; Houston and Dallas Favor McCain

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Washington DC and Atlanta Top DMA® Markets for Obama Website;
Houston and Dallas Favor McCain

Hitwise expands capabilities to include DMA® segmentation reporting

NEW YORK, NY - August 26, 2008 - Heading into the Democratic National Convention, the Washington DC, Atlanta and Denver DMA markets visited the Barack Obama website the most for the past four weeks ending August 23, 2008 reported Hitwise, an Experian® company. The new Designated Market Area (DMA®) data is based on a Swing Comparison chart that analyzes the difference between visitors of John McCain and Barack Obama's websites utilizing DMAs, which identify an exclusive geographic area of counties in the U.S. defined by zip codes.

The DMA market with the largest positive swing for the Barack Obama website was Washington, DC-MD, which had a swing of 3.48 percent. Although Washington, DC-MD users accounted for 3.53 percent of the John McCain website traffic, they accounted for 7.01 percent of traffic to the Barack Obama website, an increase (or 'swing') of 3.48 percent.

Swing Traffic Comparison of the Top DMA® Markets visiting the Presidential Candidate Websites

Top McCain DMAs	Swing Traffic	Top Obama DMAs	Swing Traffic
Houston, TX	1.62%	Washington, DC-MD	3.48%
Dallas-Ft. Worth, TX	1.41%	Atlanta, GA	2.48%
Pittsburgh, PA	0.82%	Denver, CO	1.97%
Ft. Smith, AR	0.76%	San Francisco	1.36%
Amarilo, TX	0.71%	Baltimore, MD	1.31%

Note - the data is based on the four weeks ending August 23, 2008

Source: Hitwise

For McCain, the DMA with the largest positive swing was the Houston, TX DMA (1.62 percent). Although Houston, TX users accounted for 1.33 percent of Barack Obama's online traffic, they accounted for 2.95 percent of traffic to the John McCain website, an increase (or 'swing') of 1.62 percent.

Among a category of just the two candidate websites, the Obama website received 81 percent of U.S. visits versus 19 percent for McCain's website for the week ending August 23, 2008. For more political stats please visit the Hitwise Election Data Center.

With this new reporting capability marketers and media planners can get specific online audiences from more than 8,500 websites to 210 different DMA markets in order to:

Report visitors to a website or industry (e.g. Real Estate) by DMA.
Compare the audience DMA breakdown of a website to another website, industry or to the overall U.S. Internet population.
Find websites from a specific DMA that attracts a particular demographic.

"DMA level reporting gives online marketers an advantage through finer local targeting," said Marc Johnson, chief marketing officer for Hitwise. "Combining DMA data with our existing age, gender, income data and psychographic data gives brand marketers, ad sellers and agencies alike the ability to be much more effective and efficient in their campaigns and better understand their competitors strengths and weaknesses on a local level"

For more information on how you can use DMA data please visit:
http://www.hitwise.com/registration-page/hitwise-dma-reports.php

About Hitwise

Hitwise is the leading online competitive intelligence service. Only Hitwise provides its 1,500 clients around the world with daily insights on how their customers interact with a broad range of competitive websites, and how their competitors use different tactics to attract online customers.

Since 1997, Hitwise has pioneered a unique, network-based approach to Internet measurement. Through relationships with ISPs around the world, Hitwise's patented methodology anonymously captures the online usage, search and conversion behavior of 25 million Internet users. This unprecedented volume of Internet usage data is seamlessly integrated into an easy to use, web-based service, designed to help marketers better plan, implement and report on a range of online marketing programs.

Hitwise, a subsidiary of Experian (FTS: EXPN) www.experiangroup.com operates in the United States, United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, Hong Kong and Singapore. More information about Hitwise is available at www.hitwise.com.

For up to date analysis of online trends, please visit the Hitwise Intelligence-Analyst Weblogs at http://weblogs.hitwise.com and the Hitwise Data Center at www.hitwise.com/datacenter.