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April 05, 2007
Presidential Campaigns and Pay-Per-Click Advertising
By Kai Blum
Pay-Per-Click advertising is an extremely efficient and highly customizable way to directly target potential voters. Ads are triggered by certain keywords – in this case primarily the names of the contenders - and the advertiser pays only if a user clicks on the ad. Ads can be targeted geographically, by state, county, city as well as by language (English/Spanish). Changes can be made within minutes.
The three leading Republicans are all running Google ads, bidding on their own names as well as on the names of their competitors. On the Democratic side, John Edwards and Barack Obama seem to bid only on their own names. That seems like a waste of money to me, especially if your campaign website is on top of the organic search results anyway. Why waste your money if you can have those clicks for free? Hillary Clinton’s campaign seems to realize that. They currently don’t run Google ads at all, at least here in Michigan.
It will be interesting to see if the political Pay-Per-Click ad campaigns will become more aggressive in tone and in bidding strategies as we come closer to the primaries and the presidential election. I also wonder if any campaign will take advantage of Google’s and Yahoo’s rotating ad features to quickly and efficiently test different slogans and messages before applying them to the entire presidential campaign.
Posted by Alicia Dorset at April 5, 2007 04:52 PM
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