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Big US interest in emigrating

THE re-election of George W Bush has had a big impact on American interest in migration to New Zealand.

In the weeks prior to election day - November 2 - the New Zealand Immigration Service (NZIS) website had been receiving between 2,000 and 3,000 US visitors a day.

On the day after the election, the NZIS website recorded some 10,300 visitors from the US. The following two days saw almost 6,000 hits each day.

The NZIS web page which gives its US marketing directors' contact details was added to the Hot Links at about the time of the election. In the following week, the page received 200 to 250 visits a day. On the day after the election, that page took some 1,200 hits. It was only after that that it subsided to 600 to 800 visitors a day.

The seven internet search campaigns, in which NZIS advertisements appear next to search results while someone is looking for key words on a search engine, also saw a marked increase in activity.

In the four days following the election these advertisements received some 1,700 clicks. That was out of some 28,700 searches for the selected key words, and it meant a 360 per cent increase in the clicks on the advertisement.

Two days after the election, an article appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle about Americans investigating New Zealand, Canada and Australia as immigration destinations. The next day, articles appeared on CBS News, Fox News and National Public Radio (NPR).

NPR interviewed NZIS Marketing Director Linda Lee in the San Francisco, and placed the interview on their website with a link to an NZIS web-based advertisement. That page received 265 visitors in the first two days that the article was on the www.npr.org .

That attention helped increase New Zealand's profile as an immigration destination for US citizens.

Articles have also appeared in the Sydney Morning Herald, Melbourne Age and other overseas papers raising New Zealand's profile in those countries.

Since the establishment of the NZIS' US marketing programme in February, enquiries to marketing directors have been increasing steadily.

- Lawrence Johnston