Website Relationships - Political Edition
⏰ Old Post
This post is over 7 years old - it might be slightly outdated and consigned to the history books.
We've taken HillaryClinton.com and DonaldJTrump.com as the two websites we've going to analyse.
HillaryClinton.com
Tag Relationships
Hillary only has a Google Analytics ID that we have currently tracked for the past 5 years -
We've tracked HillaryClinton.com since 2011 and it's consistently used the same UA account since then. You can even see Hillary's 2008 campaign domains using it for a while back in 2012 for some reason.
Copying a Website
There are a few strange ones in there, namely tahernezhad.com and annchapman.net - the first site is of an Iranian doctor and the second is a very strange political related landing page (not related to Clinton) - these sites have 'lifted' code at some stage from Hillary's website.
This provides the ability to use the Relationship dataset to see if websites have copied code down to an analytics level.
IP Address Changes
Hillary's website has been on Amazon's network for quite some time and has probably been using their edge content delivery network as you can see by the wildly differentiating IP addresses in use on a week to week basis as well as on an overlapping basis.
The site was on 74.205.63.1 up until 2015, which is a Rackspace owned server - clicking through to it shows it was used by a few other political related websites between 2013 and 2015 including RichardBlumenthal.com - a US senator -
It was most recently used by Palo Alto based CPA firm Sorensen and Holland but now redirects to a parked domain page.
DonaldJTrump.com
Tag Relationships
We've only started to cover DonaldJTrump.com on BuiltWith since mid-2015 - we have coverage for DonaldTrump.com and Trump.com going back to early 2011.
Web Agency Discovery
Looking at the related tag history for DonaldJTrump.com a few things stand out - pureandgentlesoap.com and homesaleadvicesa.com are both using the same Facebook Tracking Pixel. These are both Texas based businesses and a quick look at those sites identify them as being designed by Giles-Parscale. A quick Google shows that Giles-Parscale built the DonaldJTrump.com website however the link isn't always that easy to find. The relationships BuiltWith tool can help to discover this information.
Data Leaks
DonaldTwump.com and MakeAmericaFascistAgain.com are two satirical websites which have lifted the design of DonaldJTrump.com - however they have also leaked visitor information back to Trump's campaign by leaving in Google Analytics and Facebook Pixel ID of the original site in their code.
IP Address Changes
Trump's website has been using Cloudflare since we've been tracking it - it appears it was on a lower price point version of the software up until September 2015 when it appears to have moved to a more premium plan as its IP addresses appear to be dedicated to the website.
You can use this information to determine the security of a website - does it have a shared plan, is it on shared hosting, when did it move to a more premium system.
Conclusion
This is just some of the information you can garner using the BuiltWith Relationship tool on BuiltWith - just go to http://builtwith.com and enter a domain name and click the relationships tab to start exploring this data yourself. You can also automate this data into your own application or data set via the Relationships API.
Top Image Attribution: Trump by Gage Skidmore / Hillary by Lorie Shaull
