I wrote about HitWise as a Political Tracking Tool the other day and around the same time Bill Tancer indicated that HitWise has improved it’s categorization and charting of clickstream analysis to include blogging activity.

"Today we issued a press release regarding search and online politics which revealed the top issue related terms driving traffic to our politics category of over 800 sites. Leveraging some of our new charting and clickstream functionality, I decided to take a closer look at the traffic channels driving traffic to the politics category. The News category, particularly the Print News subcategory, has always figured heavily as an upstream provider, but the chart below indicates the increased influence and dominance of blogs as traffic contributors to online political sites"

Interesting.  This is the first time I heard about the improvements.   It would help HitWise if they published a list of all the improvements they make to product line, as the changes are added, and open it up so anyone can see it.   Most of the new charting abilities seem to be related to how data is categorized.

Hitwise shows that blogs (5.32%) are now contributing more attention to political sites and causes than newspapers (4.28%) and that newspapers are declining as source of traffic to political sites while blogs are continuing to gain.  No surprise, there are more and more blogs and less and less newspapers, and most of the newspapers (in electronic online form) are not as effective as blogs (but they’re trying to be).

HitWise provides, using it’s Upstream Categorization, which sites you’d want to advertise on (left and right) for politicians.

Again, no surprise here ,but if your on the left, go with the Daily Kos (even though it is mucho expensive, it gets the job done) and on the right, MichelleMalkin.com and Instapundit.com.

Point being, HitWise is the place to be if you need the most accurate data you can get on how traffic is coming and leaving your site and your competitiors.  I think HitWise is an excellent tool for any politician who knows how to use it - well worth whatever it costs. 

Spend on one less commerical and buy it and put it in the hands of someone skillful, inciteful, someone like me - not that I want the job, I don’t - but you do need people who know how to use the tool and know how to ask the right questions.