Fred Thompson Grabs Top Presidential Site Traffic Seat

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Former Senator Fred Thompson topped the presidential campaign site traffic charts in September, surpassing all other presidential candidate sites. The TV star pushed Congressman Ron Paul out of the number one position held by his site among Republican candidates since May, while longtime site traffic leader Barack Obama maintained his top ranking among Democratic presidential hopefuls.

Notably, according to exclusive information provided to ClickZ News by Hitwise, while Yahoo and Google drove about a third of the traffic to the top Republican and Democratic candidate sites, some site traffic to RonPaul2008.com actually arrived from the site of his opponent, Mitt Romney.

As shown by the site measurement firm, Hillary Clinton's Web site traffic ranking rose 4 points last month in the Democratic presidential site category, lifting the Senator's site to second place from its third place August position. John Edwards's site occupied the third spot in September, dropping 6 points in the rankings.

Official campaign sites for Joe Biden, Dennis Kucinich, Bill Richardson, Chris Dodd, and Mike Gravel remain at bottom of the rankings among Democrats, each site drawing less than 10 percent of traffic share.

For Republican candidate sites, Hitwise showed official campaign sites promoting John McCain, Rudy Giuliani, Duncan Hunter and Sam Brownback all dropped in share, while maintaining the four lowest rankings also held in August. McCain's site traffic fell the most of the four, from 12.5 percent in August to below 7 percent last month.

Paul's site lost 16 points, falling from over 42 percent share of traffic to Republican candidate sites in August to about 26 percent in September. Traffic to the official site for Mitt Romney dropped by more than half to around 8 percent share among Republicans, moving from second to fourth place in September.

September marks the first month Hitwise has tracked traffic to the campaign site of Thompson, a relatively late entry to the presidential race.

As for sites driving traffic to the top presidential candidates' Web homes, Google's main search site dominated, pushing over 20 percent of site traffic to Fred08.com and BarackObama.com. Yahoo properties drove about 11 percent of Web traffic to Thompson's site and about 8 percent to Obama's.

However, a couple outliers showed up. Political news and commentary blog site The Huffington Post spurred almost 2 percent of traffic to BarackObama.com. Meanwhile, the Romney site actually drove 2 percent of traffic to rival Thompson's site, Fred08.com.