Article Review: Best Practices for Political Advertising Online

Produced by George Washington University's Institute for Politics, Democracy & The Internet, "Best Practices for Political Advertising Online" is a primer for all parties interested in using the internet for political advertising purposes.  Split into six chapters, the article gives a strong overview of the different elements of online political advertising, including general themes, voter identification, reaching voters, and varying advertising options.

As somebody who has done a fair bit of internet ad buying, I was interested to see how this article would address online advertising related to politics.  My background is is some very specific ad platforms - like Facebook - as well as working with a larger online ad agency and brokering specific ad buys with varying outlets.  As such, I was very interested in the section on search engine marketing.  It is the field where I'm least experienced, so I hoped the article would provide both key justifications for search marketing, as well as some specific practices to employ when going about it.

Most relevant in this section was their discussion on choice of keywords, which I find interesting both for its online advertising ramifications, as well as its applicability to SEO practices.  The particular note that click throughs are less valuable than conversions is a simple idea, but nice to have spelled out.  In music, I was just as happy to have an impression on a visitor, so clicks were a good metric.  In that sense it was much more comparable to a political information campaign.  Identifying that narrower keywords will apply more directly to a specific audience is important, as it increases the likelihood for conversions from the advertising.  All told, however, I wanted some more guidance.  They note the well-known maxim that SEO is part art, part science - but fail to give specific strategic tips to help advance either the art or the science.  What types of words should you consider?  Is it good to have longer keyword strings, or shorter ones?  Are using single words valuable?

In general, I think search advertising could be extremely powerful if you have the time and ability to figure out how to make it work best for you.  More so than some more traditional marketing avenues, effective search requires a lot of knowledge about the impact of your campaign.  You have to track a lot of information to optimize how well the campaign functions, and there are virtually endless ways that you can set up a campaign.  Thankfully, there are a lot of tools that can provide metrics on your campaign; it just takes time and training to understand what the metrics mean.  As such, political campaigns would be well advised to devote substantial resources to online advertising - both in staff and finances.  The targeting power afforded by search and display ads is simply too much for any advocacy or political campaign to ignore.

Finally, I wanted to discuss the article's section on lead generation.  Noting that lead generation results from users completing online forms, author Josh Gray outlines best practices for creating leads online.  Vendors create campaigns designed to get people to fill out information which can in turn result in actionable leads for organizations to follow up on.  Like all online advertising, targeting is key.  Gray notes that lead generation can have multiple benefits - both to collect information about potential voters or supporters, but also, to use in tandem with other online advertising to actively measure how effective it is.  The flexibility the online platform provides allows campaigns to easily and quickly adjust both their online advertising strategies and their lead generation questions to optimize results.  The result are more effective ad campaigns and leads that are more likely to generate desired action.

Ultimately, the flexibility of online advertising is perhaps its biggest strength.  As online ads remain comparatively cheap, political campaigns have the ability to experiment and figure out exactly what works for them.  Once they do, the opportunities to reach large amounts of people for relatively little money is enormous.