Politics and Paid Search

Nick Griffin and the lost and found

By now Nick Griffin’s appearance on Question Time has been well dissected.

I’m not going to add much to what has already been said aside from agreeing with the Times, who borrowed a nice descriptive line from P.G. Wodehouse, comparing the BNP leader to Roderick Spode, Bertie Wooster’s nemesis and all-round pantomime villain.

Or, as Wodehouse said:

‘Big chap… with the sort of eye that can open an oyster at sixty paces.’ [link to article]

But from a search perspective, the case is worth examining a little more closely.

Ever since Obama’s beautifully executed digital strategy prised open the doors of the White House, commentators have been speculating about the effect the Internet will have on the next British General Election, which is at the very most only 195 days away.

Some already seem to be suggesting that it will be the Facebook election and swung by social media.

And (interestingly) just this week Charlie Beckett speculated that guerrilla videos might have an impact.

But nobody has said very much about search, especially paid search.

Paid Search and Keywords

For those of you that don’t know, paid search refers to the paid for adverts (referred to as sponsored links) that appear at the top (known as the blue bar) or to the right hand side of the search results.

Paid search rankings are secured by bidding on certain keywords in the Google Adwords Platform. Traditionally they have been most used by advertisers who have used paid search (or ppc/paid per click) to boost their online sales and increase brand awareness.

Political parties should (and will) start to use paid search in the same way very soon.

By ranking at the top of Google’s search results for desired keyword terms, a party, a company or an individual can control their digital footprint far more closely.

Let’s take an example from 22 April this year.

Here you can see that three people are bidding on the keyword term “budget 2009”. The first is direct.gov an information site run by the government who are hoping to increase awareness of their site.

Secondly we have the Conservatives. Budget day is obviously important for them and they have put in place a paid search strategy to direct the maximum amount of traffic to their website.

Thirdly we have some clever marketing by Anne Summers, who drily advise searchers that: ‘There is no recession in pleasure.’ Very nicely done.

It is a useful case study that shows how a political keyword term can be integrated into a paid search campaign.

Throughout the conference season last month, all the major parties missed opportunities in paid search. Off the top of my head, here are some keywords which might have been useful to marketing strategists at Conservative, Labour or Lib Dem HQ:

“gordon brown speech”

“labour party conference”

“tory party conference”

None of these were picked up on. For parties that are desperate to get their message out, it must be viewed as an opportunity missed.

Now we come to Nick Griffin. His appearance on Question Time has undoubtedly been one of the political events of the month, and it has been particularly keenly watched online: followed on Twitter and analysed in the blogs.

Here are Google Insights into searches for the keyword term “Nick Griffin” over the last seven days:

And if you click here you can see the rising number of Delicious bookmarks that have been saved under “nickgriffin”.

So last night it was interesting (and thank you to @matthewncube for pointing this out) that Channel 4 had opted to bid on the ‘nick griffin’ keyword. Here is what their advert looked like:

By appearing alone at the top of the Google search results for one of the most popular keyword terms on the Internet, Channel 4 might have doubled or tripled their site traffic.

Along with social and traditional media and SEO, paid search marketing has a role to play in the construction of a truly holistic digital strategy. So far we have seen political parties (or perhaps just the Conservatives) dipping their toes into Adwords, but their attempts so far can only be described as a scattergun approach.

Paid search has the potential to make an enormous difference. Already this year Jason Calacanis has called it the most important industry of the twenty first century. For a quick visual indication of the difference that it can make to a website’s traffic, have a look at what happened to Spiralfrog on Flickr.

It’s possible to carefully study and collect keywords, to manage and monitor huge campaigns that include short and long tail terms as well as other misspellings and oddities. With such campaigns set up, the parties could increase the number of visitors that come to their websites (the centre of any digital hub) and they could also reinforce their message on the search results – over and over and over again.

The question is this: do any of the major parties have the ability to do this in time?

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image credit: the G on Flickr
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Update: Martin Belam has written a post on this subject. It’s good for further perspective.