Ukraine Presidential Candidates Digital Marketing Campaigns Analysis

Out of all presidential candidates, seven candidates with the highest online popularity were shortlisted, including:

Petro Poroshenko
Yulia Tymoshenko
Volodymyr Zelenskiy
Ihor Smeshko
Anatoliy Hrytsenko
Oleh Lyashko
Yuriy Boyko

Histogram of Internet popularity of all Ukrainian presidential candidates in the 2020 presidential election:

Profiles of the politicians in Ukraine’s most popular and visited social media platforms, Facebook and YouTube, have been analyzed.

Apart from that, we have taken into account the data from the candidates’ official websites and their online reach based on Google search. Among the chosen seven candidates, there is no single favorite, but there are candidates who lead in certain analysis metrics.

On Facebook, Petro Poroshenko obviously ranks first by the number and quality of engaged followers and their activity. However, Volodymyr Zelenskiy’s profile is a close runner-up in terms of followers’ activity. Though Yulia Tymoshenko’s profile has six times as many followers as that of Zelenskiy, she is the second runner-up in this race. Worthy of note is the Facebook community of Ihor Smeshko, which enjoys a high followers’ engagement rate despite having been created only a month ago.

As far as YouTube is concerned, Volodymyr Zeleskiy’s channel is the absolute leader with its impressive 223,451 followers and 11 million views gathered within the six weeks of its existence. The rate of users’ interaction in comments also significantly exceeds that of his competitors. The second place is occupied by Yulia Tymoshenko’s channel although it has fewer followers than Oleh Lyashko’s page. It closely follows Petro Poroshenko’s channel in terms of views, but enjoys a significantly higher users interaction rate than the latter. Other channels are far less popular and have received fewer views and comments.

Among the official websites of Ukrainian presidential candidates, Volodymyr Zelenskiy’s website is the absolute leader, with its traffic significantly exceeding that of Zelenskiy’s immediate competitors. Yulia Tymoshenko’s, Petro Poroshenko’s, and Anatoliy Hrytsenko’s websites also rank high in terms of popularity. On the contrary, websites dedicated to Oleh Lyashko and Yuriy Boyko appear at the bottom of this list.

The general online reach shows how often users search for specific notions and facts. In the recent month, the popular search trends for presidential candidates have changed. According to the statistics, the main competitors in this metric are Volodymyr Zelenskiy and Petro Poroshenko. They are closely followed by Tymoshenko, Smeshko, and Hrytsenko. Boyko and Lyashko rank last here.

All of the main candidates have started their online promotion campaigns at the end of 2018. A surge in presidential advertising has been witnessed since January 2020, when the presidential race officially began. It is quite apparent that Volodymyr Zelenskiy’s campaign was promoted most effectively. However, the rest of the analyzed competitors make active use of various information channels and ways to engage new followers. Below we will analyze each candidate’s marketing campaign in more detail:

Petro Oleksiyovych Poroshenko

Official website

The official website of Petro Poroshenko’s party has got 53.9k visits. However, it should be taken into account that the performance indicators shown by SimilarWeb service often exceed the actual ones.

The main bulk of the traffic comes from clicks on SERPs, but a high percentage of users visit the site following direct links found in email and social media.

Facebook

The official Facebook community of Petro Poroshenko’s party reached 2,404,047 followers as of March 7.

In the last 30 days, the average page posting frequency made 5.5 posts per day, with the average post length reaching 494 characters.

The total number of reactions to videos (likes, dislikes, etc.) makes 1.1 million. The page content got 199k comments and 135k shares.

In total, 230 posts have been published on the page within the last 30 days, whereas there is a tendency towards fewer posts being published at weekends.

Posts with links to external sources and pages as well as news containing photos and videos turned out to be the most interesting ones to the readers.

Here are the most popular posts published within the last 30 days:

Youtube

Petro Poroshenko’s official YouTube channel has got 22,841 followers and 31,750,622 views as of March 9. The channel was created in April 2014 and features 822 videos.

The general user activity on the channel has significantly increased in October 2018. Before that, the channel’s performance was comparatively low .

In total, 28 videos have been published on the channel within the last month, with the average posting frequency of 0,93 per day.

The number of video views tends to decrease in the recent month.

In the list of the videos published within the last 30 days, we can witness an apparent drop in the number of views; however, the likes/dislikes ratio has experienced a positive growth.

Online reach analysis

According to keyword analysis of Google search results, it can be noticed that Russian is used more often for search queries than Ukrainian.

The following queries in Russian and Ukrainian are the most frequent ones. Interestingly, the search queries in Russian often address more private information about this candidate.

By comparing search queries in Russian and Ukrainian, we can map the geography of their popularity.