The Election, Electoral Votes and AdWords Campaigns
The election is now behind us… and so are all of the “Will John McCain or Barack Obama Win?” ad campaigns. So what’s an affiliate marketer to do! Don’t worry, I’m sure there will be plenty more political campaigns for you to start running soon enough. Someone always has an opinion and something to say.
In an earlier post, I wrote how you can still cash in before the new year, and one of the recommendations was to target the before,after and middle process of the election. Everyone knew that there was going to be a ton of attention on the election, no matter who won. With so much attention, it was guaranteed that everyone would be searching online for who won what states and how many electoral votes each site was worth.
I had a few ideas for setting up campaigns before the election, but never really got around to getting them live. With time running out, around 5:30 pm (ET), I quickly setup a Google Adwords campaign on the content network to see if I could still take advantage on the incoming surge of political search traffic. Below are the results from just 5am to midnight.
The volume wasn’t massive, but it was a very quick test run that ended up with 155 clicks and 1,595,268 impressions with only a few hours.
While the numbers aren’t astounding, the purpose of this post is to show the power and potential of targeting every big event and holiday. This campaign was setup within 20 minutes, received over 150 clicks and was made up of only 20 different adgroups. Imagine what could have been done if this was setup with more detail and all throughout the election process? Not to mention playing with keywords, ad groups and ad copy.
For those of you wondering, the offer I was promoting was a weight loss offer, and ended up profitable. It’s usually best to promote a general offer that can apply to most people when your advertising is spread across various news, blogs and web site articles. Just take a look at any of the contextual ads on ESPN, MyWay.com and Breitbart and you will usually see a cycling of weight loss and teeth whitening offers.
Have you setup any campaigns targeted towards the election or recent current events? If not, you have another four years to think about it!