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Google has taken a huge amount of campaign dollars in this Presidential election and its argued that the two candidates that have made best use of it are the two chosen by their Parties to fight it out on Nov 4th.

Both McCain and Obama spent big and early on paid search. Anyone that searched for particular terms that were closely associated with either campaign during the primary season would have found sponsored links to Obama or McCain sites. The main objective was to start to build up list of supporters’ email addresses. People who you get to to do things and give you money! Hillary Clinton came in late to this tactic and suffered for it with a much smaller volunteer list.

The key is to keep an eye on search trends and ensure you are responding properly with your Ad Word messages and where you point people to. This is current data from Hitwise on search trends. It shows people are no longer researching issues, they are looking for where to vote. What you’ll see is both campaigns geo-targeting information on polling stations, help to get there and last minute messaging like this. 

  PRs on this side of the pond, me included, are devouring coverage of the US election, seeing what ideas and innovations we can import into our own sphere.

My eyes lit up when I saw this story in PR Week about a new start-up in the UK that’s looking to ape Barack Obama’s search strategies and offer advice to clients in the UK. I decided to put a bit of flesh on the bone in terms of what Barack’s strategy is on search;

 His two main players are Josh Orton, who left in October, and Scott Goodstein  (primarily and who is behind this) built a system that integrated the campaign’s PR and press efforts with PPC advertising. Orton worked more with the blogosphere, but their system basically focused on two key points

1) Speed - they focused on getting PPC (pay-per-click/Adwords) ads up as soon as they found out a story was about to break. The main problem was that their geeks at HQ weren’t talking to the journalists (only Obama’s press people) and so information flow was something they tried to fix. They got their early morning discussions with senior staff to also include possible stories that would break in the various parts of the country, and that memo was then passed to the Pay Per Click-optimising team.

2) Targeting - they started with name targeting, but then branched into devising a strategy for John Edwards’ keywords as well (e.g., using “poverty”, etc). Then branched into policy targeting, and in early January (just before Iowa) began looking at regional trends (e.g., people in Iowa were searching for “energy subsidy” and so made sure Obama’s ads were there) and matching everything together.

They basically flooded the market, and at one point were bidding against themselves for ad placement!