Once the major news outlets received the word that Obama had selected Senator Joe Biden of Delaware as his running mate, the announcement immediately resulted in a huge increase in the volume of searches for the search term ‘joe biden’ as internet users sought to learn more about Obama’s VP pick. The majority of searches for ‘joe biden’ resulted in a click through to Wikipedia and the official website pages of the United States Senate. Not surprisingly, these websites are among the top organic results on the major search engines and received much of the organic search referrals from the term last week.

When looking only at paid clicks, the website of Barack Obama was the only recipient of paid click-throughs on the search term for the week ending August 23, 2008. The bulk of the clicks following a search took place on Google, followed by Yahoo! and MSN, but only sponsored ads on Google drove paid traffic for the search term. While this data spans an entire week, I would assume that the search campaigns started later in the week to avoid pre-empting the announcement through a paid search campaign driving traffic to Obama’s website. The data for this current week will be interesting to look at as both candidates are now actively bidding on the term to drive traffic to their websites.