It has become conventional wisdom of this campaign season: Barack Obama is crushing John McCain on the Internet. After all, Obama boasts higher online donations, more aggressive social networking and a viral video from rapper will.i.am that was viewed more than 8 million times on YouTube.
John McCain’s most famous viral music video is a clip of him jokingly singing “Bomb Iran.”
Story Continued Below
But there’s one way Obama can’t beat McCain on the Internet: advertising price.
According to data from the Google AdWords website, advertisements targeted to users searching for “John McCain” on the Internet cost nearly twice as much as those targeting users searching for “Barack Obama.”
Google sells ads in a constant, nearly instantaneous auction in which advertisers bid on individual search terms. The Mountain View, Calif.-based company estimates that the cost for one day of advertising around the search term “Barack Obama” ranges from $150 to $240. But it costs between $250 and $470 per day to buy ads on “John McCain” searches.
What’s more, Google predicts that the term “Barack Obama” will generate 153 to 191 clicks per day on related advertisements. But “John McCain” does much better as advertiser bait: Google estimates that those ads get 213 to 266 clicks per day.
In other words, the Google advertising market is telling us that “John McCain” is more valuable than “Barack Obama.”
Why is that? Peter Greenberger, Google’s manager of elections and issue advocacy advertising, explains: “The cost of a keyword is determined by what the advertiser is willing to bid and the quality score of that ad — meaning how relevant that ad is.”
On Google, advertisers pay to buy ads placed into searches for individual words. A pizza chain might pay to buy ads on the search pages for anyone who enters “pizza,” for example. The prices to buy ads on each word fluctuate according to supply and demand.
Also, Google assigns each ad what it calls a “quality score.” That’s determined by as many as 1,000 different factors that Google has plugged into a computer algorithm to determine how useful that ad is to Google’s users. The algorithm takes into account factors such as how often users click on the ad and how long they stay on the advertiser’s website once they click through.
That calculation is done every time a user types in the search phrase, which is why you might see one group of ads on a given Google search and an entirely different set for the same search conducted two seconds later. On top of that, the ads can be targeted locally, so searchers in one part of the country see a different set of ads than those searching elsewhere.
Still, something must be causing the price of “John McCain” to soar higher than the price of “Barack Obama.”
One key is that both of the campaigns themselves are advertising on their own names. Neither campaign responded to a request for comment from Politico. But Republican new media consultant David All thinks one reason for the price difference may be that the McCain campaign itself is bidding up the price of “John McCain” related ads.
“It’s a free market, and John McCain’s campaign has said very publicly that they’re investing resourced into online advertising,” says All.
He argues that’s a smart bet for the McCain team: they’re clearly getting a healthy click-though rate for their ads. And they seem aggressive: one of the ads viewers see when searching for “Barack Obama” looks as if it was placed by the McCain campaign. “Obama for president?” the ad asks. “Why not learn more about John McCain for president.” The ad links to McCain’s campaign website.
The high prices, though, could be evidence of a problem for the McCain campaign. Because of the vast interest in their candidate online, the Obama camp simply may not feel it has to bid as highly for ads on “Barack Obama.”
If it is any consolation to either campaign, advertising on their names is still relatively cheap. Buying an ad next to the term “pizza” can cost between $6,470 and $12,150 per day — about 50 times more than those on a search of “Barack Obama.”