Political Search Conquering in 2020. Is It Still a Thing?

So does being #1 on your opponent’s brand terms really matter anymore? Historically marketers had to be first, and if they weren’t, well, they weren’t running a very comprehensive search campaign. The same thing extended to politics, but this race is proof that this strategy is changing.

While running digital advertising for a high profile 2020 Republican Senate campaign we encountered his opponent buying our brand terms and occasionally appearing higher in the search results than our ads. Was that a reason to panic or a change in strategy? My candidate won reelection in a big fashion, but let’s take a micro look on paid search strategy and the changes in the political search over the years to see if ad position is still king and find out if  search conquering is useful anymore.

What is search conquering? Simply, it is running your own text ads on your competition’s brand terms.  Back when I worked at the online brokerage firm DLJDirect, it was common practice to buy your competitor’s terms and run ads on them. In fact, when I joined Campaign Solutions - CDIAds back in, wow, 2007 and started working on the McCain for President Campaign, I brought that tactic with me. We even had an article published in The Hill that cried foul when I bought Rudy Giuliani’s brand terms and ran McCain for President ads on them; that got me called into the office with our founder because it was too soon in the process to do something like that. Who knew?  Later on in the 2008 cycle, however, we definitely took advantage of Barack Obama’s search traffic and there were plenty of articles that wrote about it. However, that was 2008. Is it still a thing?

Well before we answer that, let's roll back a few years to the last presidential election cycle. Back then, Google Search was really just a pay per click game. Sure, there was enhanced cost per click and later on Cost Per Action (CPA) bidding, but really at the end of the day it was cost per click. Bidding on your opponent’s brand terms, in theory, would drive everyone’s cost per click up (there were always quality scores and page rankings, but let’s not get sidetracked). While it might look like you were stealing traffic, unless you really wrote some slimy text ads, that was never an issue. 

In this cycle, we’ve had the rise of the machine learning and this truly beautiful goal of ROAS (or ROI, Return On Investment, for those not fond of Google’s terms). If you set up your  tracking correctly and have enough conversions, you can have Google place your ads based on your ROI objective (I like to set it at 130%). Now based on the ROI objective, Google’s machines are in the driver’s seat when it comes to bidding —> when to raise your bids, when to lower them and when to increase your spend to capture all that extra traffic. Google’s machines can also expand your search terms, if you use broad matches. ROI optimization is not quite set it and forget it because your search terms need to be monitored, you need to set geo targeting and create well written text ads, but it’s quite a long way away from just adjusting your bids.

There is also another substantial change since the Dark Ages,  but it has to do with the organic search listings. As you can see from the screen shot, there is a lot more information found in the search results—knowledge box on the right, news on the top, Twitter results, the official page and wikipedia. That’s a a lot to compete with. The other major change is the rise in mobile traffic. Mobile results cut back on the amount of paid search positions and that becomes extremely important in rankings.

In the height of competition between the Republican Senate Campaign that I was managing and the Democratic Senate campaign, search really took off. I was getting emails via the campaign from people all over the country complaining that the Democratic Campaign’s ads were “on top of” our ads, but should that really matter any more?

I guess there is some value, but who really wins in the end? Well Google, since it certainly is not the campaign that is using this strategy. Why? I can guarantee you the ROI from this type of bidding is bad because of the way the organic page is built (nobody is stealing traffic) and a little thing called quality score which is likely causing the opponent to pay more for the same clicks.

When you peel back the envelope and look at the results from  inside your geo target (state or district), there might be some value in showing strength, but that’s a PR call. I’d argue to ignore it. On the national level where you are trying to fundraise, it definitely doesn’t matter, especially with an ROI bidding strategy (having Google optimize your ads based on your ROI objective). 

For example, here is Auction Insight data from our national search  campaign. What you can see is that our Senate Campaign was at the absolute top of page 85% of the time (that’s the very tippy top which really helps on the mobile side) while our Democratic opponent was only at the very tippy top 9% of the time on of our brand searches. So what does this all mean in the end? Well let’s answer some questions…

1. Do you have your national search optimized on ROI? If yes, then who cares?
2. Is your in-geo target search optimized for ROI or impression share? 
1. If ROI, once again who cares?
2. If impression share, maybe, but you need to be careful because really Google wins.
3. What do your mobile results look like? If you are 90%+ on the absolute top of page, then who cares? If you are below 90% but it’s ROI optimized, it’s a judgement call but if it’s still high, you shouldn’t care.

So, was our Democratic Opponent a Search conqueror? Well the data says no. The election results say no. Plus, the ROIs for our campaigns were greater than 200%. So, is there a place for Search Conquering Strategy? Only if you like or need to needle your opponent, otherwise, the only winner in your strategy is Google who makes even more due to increased bids on more clicks.

PardonMyFrench,

Eric