Rimm-Kaufman Proves Once Again That McCain's Search is #1

The Rimm-Kaufman group published a study the other day called Search and Politics 2008 and they get this study correct unlike past ones where I was very critical.  What usually gets me fired up is when some knucklehead blogger spends 10 minutes running some search queries and makes erroneous conclusions regarding the extent of politicians running PPC ads.  These wanna be search marketers are very often wrong and have no basis for the "advice" they dish out for free.  This version of the Rimm-Kaufman study is not only more than directionally correct but provides me with a basis for confirming what I've always believed the competition is doing online.

• Less than half of 2008 presidential contenders are using paid search advertising
• Even fewer are advertising searches related to key campaign issues.
  
• More Republicans are using paid search advertising than Democrats.
• Google (YouTube) is a major advertiser on political queries.
• Political campaigns (except McCain which is my observation) lack sophistication as paid search advertisers.

Also towards the back, they offer 6 basic search techniques that the novice search marketer should pay attention to.  Obviously this is search 101 and applies to political marketing but as I personally can attest to is not a full proof plan for running search campaigns; as a colleague once told me marketing politics is not like selling cds.  The 6 search techniques are:

1. Spend ad dollars on search:  Personally I have a minimum spend for local, state, national, and presidential campaigns
2. Advertise on your own name:  Sounds like a no-brainer but it is also a defensive strategy to help combat any "George Allen" problems.
3. Advertise on issues plus your own name+issues:  This is where the faint of heart often bail out.  This is way not as simple as it sounds and where non-political advertisers  fall short.  Not only can you spend a ton of money here you can also get little back in return if you don't know what you are doing.  You must have a well thought out strategy for buying issue words and need someone with some experience.
4. Advertise on Google, Yahoo, MSN
5. Advertise on other candidate's names:  Again not a simple strategy with similar pitfalls to #3 above.
6. Choose good landing pages:  This is where many campaigns fall short by sending clicks into a homepage or a generic landing page.  You need multiple landing pages to not only help with conversions but relevancy too.

Anyway, I thoroughly enjoyed the Rimm-Kaufman study and other than our brilliant McCain search campaign, I liked getting some confirmation as to what our competition is doing.  Rudy's team has a good search strategy while everyone else if they have even figured out how to spell "PPC" are still just playing around.

PardonMyFrench,

Eric

Comments

[Alan Rimm-Kaufman]

Hi Eric --

Thanks for the link and the kind words.

You wrote:

... our brilliant McCain search campaign ... I liked getting some confirmation as to what our competition is doing

Curious: are you (solo? agency? Piehead?) handling PPC for McCain?

Cheers --

Alan

[Mark]

Hey Eric,

I'm a fellow Jersian and work in the search marketing industry as well. I've been poking around finding info on the candidates and their search campaigns and have found your comments and analysis extremely helpful! Thanks for the posts. Are you handling search for McCain? If so kudos on the great job I've noticed over the past month (since i start keeping track) that his search marketing is by far the best out of everyone both democrat and republican.

Best,

Mark