3 Secret Tools for Presidential Election Advertising Campaigns

I'm intrigued with the notion of real-time advertising, reacting to a current event offline that leads to a spike in searches online and displaying advertising alongside those searches. Examples of these kinds of events that translate to online advertising opportunities include the Super Bowl and the recent YouTube Debate. I've devoted some of my firm's AdWords R&D budget to testing the effectiveness of real-time advertising. Speaking with a journalist about this topic yesterday and seeing the Google's (GOOG) YouTube is officially an election tool post on BloggingStocks prompted me to detail how 3 of Google's tools can be used for presidential election advertising campaigns. This is a continuation of the CNN YouTube Presidential Debate AdWords Experiment. These are the tools:

1. Google Hot Trends
2. Google AdWords
3. Dynamic Keyword Insertion (DKI)

Here's a specific example of how I used them in a recent online advertising experiment. First, check the search trends data when a current event is taking place:



Notice items #1 and #5. Drilling down into the iowa straw poll search trends for that day:



I bought these keywords (using this keyword bidding strategy) via Google AdWords and ran a short term test for part of the day on Saturday (reacting to the search trends) and then 2 full days afterwards:



Notice that the exact matches [iowa straw poll results] and [iowa straw poll] yielded the most ad impressions and clicks. Also, the average CPC (cost per click) was a mere 13 cents. Think about that. For less than the cost of postage, a presidential candidate could have acquired a visitor to their election campaign web site. How much would a direct mail advertising campaign have cost to acquire 1,820 visitors to their site? How much would a radio or TV or print ad campaign have cost to generate that much interest? Remember, too, that impressions are free. What would it have been worth a presidential candidate to have their message displayed 41,552 times when potential voters were searching for keywords like iowa straw poll? Can you see why search engine advertising is so effective?

It's worth pointing out that I simply threw these new "iowa straw poll" keywords into the existing ad group I'd built for the YouTube Debate AdWords Experiment. Had I built a more specific landing page, the quality scores would have been higher and the minimum bids lower. (See a helpful explanation of minimum bids on eWhisper). The reason I could use the existing ad group is dynamic keyword insertion (excellent DKI guide via RedFly Marketing). I had to pay some higher minimum bids initially but once the ads ran a bit and the CTRs were good for the high volume keywords, the quality scores improved and the minimum bids dropped. For the highest search volume keyword, the minimum bid even dropped below 5 cents. Here are the ads I had in rotation using DKI:



Here's the landing page from the ads:

• Debate Question: Which Presidential Candidate is Most Qualified for the Job?

Want more details on these kinds of real-time advertising strategies using Google AdWords? Follow the initial advertising experiment:

• CNN YouTube Presidential Debate AdWords Experiment
• AdWords Experiment Update #1: Democratic Debate Search Trends
• AdWords Experiment Update #2: YouTube Debate Top 10 Keywords

Apogee Tags: presidential election, advertising campaigns, youtube debate, iowa straw poll results, dynamic keyword insertion, dki, quality score, google adwords, goog