Maine Munchies Ad

Sunday, August 05, 2007

AdWords Experiment Update #2: YouTube Debate Top 10 Keywords

These are the top 10 keywords (by ad impressions) from the CNN YouTube Presidential Debate AdWords Experiment I recently conducted:

youtube debate keywords

That's during a time between YouTube debates. I'm sure a Google search for republican debate would generate a significant number of ad impressions today (see the hot trends data). Apparently, ABC hosted a Republican debate in Iowa this morning. Only one political candidate is visible in the republican debate SERP (search engine results page) - see below.

As the presidential candidates invest time and money in their Internet presence during this election season, why are they ignoring search engines? Don't they want to get their message in front of an Internet audience that's actively seeking information about the debates? I'll run down the top 5 searches from the experiment and will identify any presidential candidates that are currently running search ads:
  1. youtube debate | no candidates
  2. democratic debate | Barack Obama
  3. democratic candidates | no candidates
  4. cnn youtube debate | no candidates
  5. republican debate | Mitt Romney
Wow! Only one presidential candidate from each party is running a Google AdWords campaign that targets these important keywords. Why are the political candidates neglecting search engine advertising?

Related Posts:
AdWords Experiment Update #1: Democratic Debate Search Trends
YouTube Debate +1 for John Edwards Campaign
CNN YouTube Presidential Debate AdWords Experiment

Tags (made w/ TagBuildr + TagTrends): , , , , , ,

2 Comments:

Blogger KatieK said...

This is great stuff! I have started working for a congressional candidate (actually a family member) to implement some strategic PPC marketing in Google and have found essentially the same thing... very few candidates use Google Adwords and if they do, not very well. There are so many areas of search, even for those candidates that do use PPC, where major keywords and phrases are missing.

So far I have found the McCain camp to be the most involved, followed by Obama. It will be interesting to see how that progresses if those are the two final candidates. It will be even more interesting to see what happens if McCain faces Clinton, who does absolutely nothing PPC wise (whereby McCain could have the tools to really hurt Clinton via the internet through PPC marketing).

Sat Apr 12, 05:17:00 PM EDT  
Blogger Richard said...

Thanks, KatieK. Yes, the intersection of politics and PPC is fascinating. To understand why McCain is doing so well with PPC, you'll want to read Eric Frenchman's blog.

Also, you might find the Wired article, Which Presidential Candidates Have Mastered Google, interesting.

Sun Apr 13, 10:07:00 PM EDT  

Post a Comment

<< Home