CNN YouTube Presidential Debate AdWords Experiment

In Democratic Candidates Miss a YouTube Debate Opportunity, I argued that the presidential candidates should be watching current search trends and buying pay per click advertising via Google AdWords. I've decided to buy some keyword ads myself, as an experiment to answer this question left in the comments on that post:

But the question remains, how many people seriously search for the debate after it is over?

I doubt the search engines will release the numbers to tell the popularity of the search terms such as you mention -- though if it was significant, you'd think they'd have an advertising rep. contact the campaigns to tell them x-number of people are searching for information on the campaign/debate.

Google, via Hot Trends, does in fact provide some of this information, albeit in a qualitative and not quantitative form, which is also heavily filtered. (I use a tool I'm testing called TagTrends to help me scan the Google hot search trends.) Consider these hot search trend results from the day of the CNN YouTube Democratic Debate and the next day:





For the Google search youtube debate, there was a spike in keyword search volume on the day of the debate. The next day, though, people continued to search for those keywords. One way to see if that trend continues is to go ahead and buy those keywords via AdWords and to then track the keyword ad impressions. That's what I'm going to do. I plan to also use this as a case study to explain some AdWords strategies I implement on behalf of my clients. Subscribe to Apogee Weblog if you want to find out how this AdWords experiment unfolds.

Now, since I'll be spending money during the course of this experiment, I might as well promote the candidates I'm currently considering voting for. As an independent voter, I'll link to the campaigns of two candidates from each party.

Democratic Candidates:
Bill Richardson
Barack Obama

Republican Candidates:
Rudy Giuliani
Ron Paul

Apogee Tags (NOT Technorati Tags): youtube debate, cnn debate, presidential debates, democratic candidates, republican candidates, bill richardson, barack obama, rudy giuliani, ron paul, google adwords, hot trends, search engine advertising