SEM: Election ‘08 - There’s No Debate When it Comes to Optimized Landing Pages for Search Engine Ads

Written By Andaiye Taylor | October 2, 2008 | Share This |

Palin Kiss

Successful search marketing campaigns require marketers to execute a multi-pronged strategy the right way. For a political campaign (and any campaign that is impacted by rapidly shifting events) search campaigns must be 24-hour-news-cycle-ready, and if the landing page isn’t spot on it may as well not be run at all.

As we noted earlier this week, the Obama campaign appears to have become a lot more aggressive and quick on the draw with their search marketing strategy. Yet there are two areas where the campaign can build on their improved search presence. First, the Obama campaign could employ a much more tactical landing page strategy. Secondly, and particularly because this is a political campaign, both campaigns could do a better job of pivoting between evergreen issues, those that will always be of interest, and flare-ups, those all-consuming – if sometimes temporary – issues that rule news cycles until another flare-up overtakes them. (Sometimes the two merge as with the always important but, of late, direly important economy in recent weeks.)

Let’s take the immediate post-debate search advertising landscape as an illustration. Both campaigns maintained a presence on the most obvious terms – keywords like “Obama Debate” for Obama, “McCain Debate” for McCain, and “presidential debate” for both. (Interestingly, there were three Obama ads cycling when I searched “Obama Debate” – of which only one employed affirmative “Obama Won” messaging. The other two left more to the imagination, with headlines that read “Presidential Debate Info” and “Who Won the Debate?” McCain’s ads all characterized him as the winner).

However, John McCain’s landing page was arguably a lot more effective than was Obama’s. Immediately after the debate, McCain’s landing page featured 16 refutations of statements that Obama made during the debate. The refutations served as hearty red meat for McCain supporters, and as potentially distracting counterpoints (at least from Obama’s perspective) for undecideds. It also may have made McCain’s landing page more relevant to search engines - lowering his cost.

Obama’s page, on the other hand, was a signup page that provided a short highlight reel from the debate, but did not attempt to clarify or frame any of its key moments. For its part, the Obama campaign could have fact checked McCain, offering documentary evidence or third-party statements to refute false claims or misrepresentations made by McCain.

Even as of this writing, John McCain’s debate landing page contains pointed content that speaks to the actual debate, while Senator Obama’s is still a comparatively weak signup page.

Both camps could have taken this strategy one step further by actually bidding on keywords that captured key moments from the debate itself, those sound bites that would come to dominate post-debate punditry for a news cycle or two. I searched the term “Henry Kissinger” a few times in the hours after the debate, but the search real estate on Google was wide open – no bidders.

Yet if we look at volume on the term “Henry Kissinger” for the past thirty days, we see it start at a negligible level on September 26th,and spike sharply on the 27th – the night of the debate:

The candidate who moved swiftly to capture that traffic could have gotten a hearing from some of those inquisitors if they’d posted an ad that drove to a relevant landing page. Obama, for instance, could have posted video of Kissinger where he states that direct negotiations should start with Iran at a “very high level”, which seems to jibe with Obama’s enunciation of a policy of lower level talks that might culminate with the president becoming directly involved.

We have three more debates, and two and a half fortnights of new cycles, before the election to see whether either or both of the campaigns become smarter about their search strategy, particularly as the campaign unfolds in unpredictable directions.

An early read on the veep debate strategy: As of 10:12 PM EST the night before the debate, Obama is currently the only candidate running any VP debate-specific ads: