2008 Presidential Election PPC Strategy.

John McCain and Barack Obama both know that Hispanics are a potential swing factor for the election. Hispanics are the nation’s largest and fastest growing minority group. With an estimated 46 million people, Hispanics make up 15 percent of the U.S. population (Pew Hispanic Center, 2008), and this year, Latinos comprise 9 percent of the eligible electorate.

And U.S. Hispanics are online in greater numbers than ever before. According to the eMarketer: U.S. Hispanics Media Usage 2008 Report, there are 23 million Hispanic Internet users, and they spend more time online than watching TV or reading newspapers and magazines.

With these kinds of numbers you would think McCain and Obama would be investing big-time resources to reach U.S. Hispanics on the Web via pay-per-click campaigns. This is not the case. Obama has spent more than $3 million on Google ads with a bulk of that likely going to search and contextual ads. McCain has not released figures for his online ad spending, but we assume it’s lower than Obama.

In September Valleywag dug up data from HitWise and found the keywords the candidates purchased on Google. While many keywords are the same in English and Spanish (i.e., Palin, John McCain, Obama), both candidates bid for keywords related to specific components of their campaigns (i.e., gas prices, Obama taxes, McCain energy).

To look deeper into the candidates’ Hispanic SEM strategy, we plugged in all the keywords McCain and Obama use in their English search campaigns but in Spanish. Only three showed up for Obama and zero for McCain. The three Spanish keywords the Obama campaign bid on were “biografÍa obama,” “obama sitio oficial” and “barack obama presidente.” However, the ad executions were in English and took the user to the English version of Obama’s donation page (both Obama and McCain have Spanish versions of their sites).

Next, we went to Google’s keyword tool to look up keywords in Spanish that, had the two candidates had an SEM campaign in place, would have driven considerable traffic to the Spanish versions of their sites. Since Google’s keyword tool gives us global search volume, we had to do some of our own math. The total number of Spanish-speaking Internet users in the world (minus the U.S) is somewhere around 114 million. Since the number of Hispanic Internet users in the U.S. is 23 million, we are assuming that close to 17 percent of the world’s Spanish-language searches originated in the U.S. The keywords we chose to analyze were:

· Elecciones (Elections) – 4,607 searches per month.

· Petroleo (Oil) – 3,077 searches per month.

· Inmigración (Immigration) – 18,700 searches per month.

· Impuestos (Taxes) – 2,516 searches per month.

· Educación (Education) – 12,580 searches per month.

· Guerra (War) – 255,000 searches per month.

· Gasolina (Gasoline) – 10,285 searches per month.

· Elecciones presidente (President elections) – 918 searches per month.

· Encuestas elecciones 2008 (Polls elections 2008) – 918 searches per month.

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If we take a conservative 2 percent average click-through rate for ads on Google, the number of clicks per month for each keyword would have been:
· Elecciones: 92

· Petroleo: 62

· Inmigracion: 374

· Impuestos: 50

· Educacion: 252

· Guerra: 5,100

· Gasolina: 206

· Elecciones presidente: 18

· Encuestas elecciones 2008: 18

Which brings the total number of visits per month each candidate missed for not bidding on these nine keywords to 6,172.

Both candidates missed out on thousands of visits from Web-savvy Hispanic Internet users and possibly their donation money as well. The importance of having a Spanish-specific SEM campaign can’t be stressed enough. Will this turn out to be a factor on election day? We’ll have to wait and see.

By: Rob Kallick and Ramiro Padilla, Sensis