PPC (Electoral) Campaign
So a little while ago, I talked about how the Canadian Liberal Party started using Google AdWords to bid first on the names of their own candidates, and then later on the names of rival candidates. The landing pages for the latter set of PPC ads were, of course, Liberal Party pages. The problem was, however, was that these PPC campaigns seemed to lack direction. As one SEOer noted:
The Liberals clearly have no measurable goals for the ads and site to achieve. [...]
From what I can tell, the Liberals are just buying search engine advertising in order to get exposure and to project an image of a technologically inclined party.
This all, of course, begs the question: how could political parties effectively leverage PPC advertising toward substantial electoral gains? Well, there are two ways, and they have to do with separate levels of the party apparatus. On the one hand, there is the national campaign through which the party can raise the its profile and dominance of certain issues. On the other hand, PPC advertising can be used to advance the prospects of individual candidates getting elected in disputed ridings where either they are the underdog, or there is no established candidate.
The National Level
Every electoral campaign is dominated by certain key issues, and it is on these issues that parties have the potential to leverage PPC advertising in their favor. Of course, if political parties are going to do it properly, they probably want to plan and execute the PPC (electoral) campaign in just the right way. Consequently, they should
- Compile a list of keywords that relate to the issues that are dominating the race.
- Determine what they want voters to find when they are researching these issues, and develop landing pages accordingly. The party's homepage isn't going to be enough. Parties need to develop informative, impressive, and persuasive content pages that are going to reflect the kind of information that voters are going to expect from and organic search results. Of course, these pages should also get the party's message on that issue across.
- Set up accounts with both Google and Yahoo, and divide their budget based on approximately how much users each one (about 2/3 Google, and 1/3 Yahoo)
- Now when it comes to bidding on these keywords, party (PPC) campaign manager need to remember to geo target these ads. First, they need to make sure that these ads/sponsored-results are only showing up on searches being conducted in their country. Secondly, if there are particular regions where the party is losing ground on certain issues, they might want to have more of their ads for keywords relevant to those issues being displayed to users in those regions.
One thing that PPC electoral campaign managers are going to have to make a decision on, however, is the exact nature of those landing pages. On the one hand, they can make them seem objective. Although voters would undoubtedly find them more convincing, the consequences of being caught would be catastrophic.
On the hand, they can put their party stamp on each of these landing pages. Although this would be less persuasive as for as voters who are looking for objective facts are concerned, a personal touch can go a long way in terms of wooing the electorate. If the party has a particular personality or candidate who has been championing a certain issue, then they might want to put that candidate's stamp on the landing pages. Conversely, if that personality has been particularly controversial or contentious, they might want avoid doing so.
Similarly, geo-targeting can be used to ensure that voters in different ridings receive ads on certain keywords that go to different landing pages. Therefore, if an issue is hot, but the party's champion on that issue is loved in some ridings and despised in others, then the party PPC electoral campaign manager might want to consider developing different landing pages for these different kinds of scenarios.
All in all, the rules for a successful national level PPC electoral campaign are pretty much the same as those for running any successful PPC campaign: (1) choose effective keywords for in-demand issues; (2) geo-target your ads according to market/electorate demographics; and (3) ensure that the landing pages are relevant. The only difference (and this is what makes political PPC campaigning so challenging) is that there's no way to measure the conversion rate. Consequently, it becomes difficult to test and tweak your keyword bids and the content of your landing pages.
Is this a reason to eschew PPC electoral campaigning? I don't think so. Party campaigner might just want to be more selective about what issues they bid on keywords for, and for how long they run those campaigns. It is probably only worth it to run PPC campaign on the most contentious issues and only in riding where the race is most competitive. This is why geo targeting is so important. Furthermore, party campaign managers might want to consider only running PPC campaigns in the closing weeks of the race -- maybe the last 1-2 weeks leading up to polling day. Otherwise, such a campaign could get pretty expensive.
