Candidates hope to click with keywords
Search engine ads link to campaigns
Do a Google search for "POW," and besides links to advocacy groups and databases, an ad appears that links to Republican John McCain's presidential campaign website.
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Those small text ads, which appear on the right side of the screen under "sponsored links," or "sponsor results," and connect to candidate websites, are cropping up more often as campaigns seek donors and volunteers among people searching the Internet. Some campaign officials and consultants spend hours trying to figure out which words will get the most people to click on their ads - something businesses have done for years to find customers.
Google, Yahoo, and MSN offer versions of this advertising vehicle, and all of them work roughly the same way.
The campaigns bid on specific search keywords through an auction, so the price varies according to demand. ("War on terror" is sometimes prohibitively expensive, said one official with Republican Mitt Romney's campaign.) The campaigns are charged only when someone clicks on an ad. And campaigns can cap their spending, so that once the limit is reached, their ad stops appearing.
The candidates are taking advantage of the technology with varying levels of intensity. Democrat Hillary Clinton's campaign says it has only purchased the candidate's name and its various misspellings, while the McCain campaign buys thousands of words at a time.
Romney's campaign has several hundred words at any given time and adds more at key moments. The campaign increased the number of words it bought, for instance, after Romney won the Iowa straw poll last month.
Sometimes political ads can appear in unexpected places. Last month, a Romney display ad - not just a website link - appeared on the "Brady Bunch Movie" page on the movie database IMDb.com. That is probably because a term like "family values" or "family issues" was on Romney's keyword list, said Mindy Finn, the campaign's director of e-strategy. (Google generates display ads on other websites by searching for the keywords.)
Increasingly, the campaigns are choosing words strategically and keeping the opposition in mind. Last week, a Google search for "2002 Olympics," the Winter Games that Romney led in Salt Lake City, called up an ad for McCain.
McCain consultant Eric Frenchman said he keeps a running list of thousands of keywords, evaluates which words are most successful, and adds and subtracts hundreds daily. Early in the campaign, he said, he purchased a group of issue words - like most campaign strategists, he won't say which ones - that he thought were no-brainers. They did not lead to enough donations or clicks into McCain's website so he dropped them.
"I'm constantly moving words in and out," Frenchman said.
And if an issue becomes the hot news story of the day, he said, "I'll buy words about it."
Keyword-search advertising has been around for several years - it is the subject of much analysis in the marketing field about how to use the practice most effectively. But it is new to the world of presidential campaigns. Within the past year, both Google and Yahoo created divisions geared toward political content and have been regaling campaigns with the benefits of online ads.
Peter Greenberger, the manager of Google's elections and advocacy team, said campaigns typically spend from 50 cents to $2.50 per click on their ads. Some campaigns spend hundreds of dollars per day, he said, while others spend as much as $1,000.
That's nothing compared with what the private sector spends. Richard Kosinski, Yahoo's vice president of political advertising, says some business clients manage tens of thousands, even millions, of keywords at any given time.
And some of the keywords bought by businesses are candidate's names. A Google search yesterday for "Mitt Romney," for example, brought up links to an outfit selling campaign buttons and another hawking books.
Campaigns still spend far less on online advertising than traditional television ads.
Finn said online advertising accounts for less than 10 percent of the Romney campaign's advertising budget - and the campaign spends far more time and energy on its own website and online content. "Advertising is not the core way that you get a message out through the Web," she said.
Still, keyword ads can pay dividends. The McCain campaign has raised $4 in donations for every $1 it has spent on online ads, said Frenchman, chief Internet strategist for Connell Donatelli Inc., a McCain campaign consultant.
Frenchman said people who click on McCain ads are directed to a "landing page" that targets an issue or asks for donations. Some ads appear only in certain geographic areas.
Nearly all the presidential campaigns have increased their use of keyword ads in recent months, Google's Greenberger said.
Most candidates start by buying their own names, he said, and then experiment with issue words.
Kosinski said he expects that in coming months as primaries and caucuses near, the ads - which are now mostly aimed at acquiring supporters and donations - will shift toward emotional appeals to voters.
A study last month by iCrossing, a digital marketing firm, found that people researching campaigns online are far more interested in issues and voting history than in a candidate's personal history or religion. But few campaigns were making good use of issue-oriented words, the study found. In searches for gas prices, healthcare, global warming, and the war in Iraq,
"If you're a candidate, marketing yourself online is not really that much different than if you're a major brand," said Noah Elkin, vice president of corporate strategy at iCrossing. "There's an opportunity that very few candidates have really availed themselves of to build visibility."
Of course, even when a candidate's ads are visible, the process is not perfect. Last month, a New York Observer reporter wrote a snarky piece after spotting an Obama ad that, through a keyword purchase, ended up on the website of the Equal Justice Foundation on a page filled with virulent attacks on Clinton.
"We removed our ad from the site and we moved on," said Obama spokeswoman Jen Psaki.
Greenberger said Google works with campaigns to exclude certain sites from their advertising. But cross-pollination is not always so bad, he said.
"It depends on your strategy," he said. "It can also be a fun way to get a rise out of the opposition."
Joanna Weiss can be reached at weiss@globe.com. 