Three members of the Econsultancy marketing blog have called the effectiveness of how PPC search advertising is being used during the UK’s 2010 general election campaign.
The 2010 general election has seen unprecedented use of digital media in party campaigning methods. As well as social media campaigning via Youtube, Twitter and Facebook and limited attempts at crowdsourcing content generation for campaign material, all parties have tried their hands at using the tools of search engine marketing.
Labour, for example, claims to have bolstered its on-site search engine optimisation to gain greater visibility in natural rankings, whilst the Conservatives have invested heavily in paid adverts on Google’s AdWords system.
Yet according to Econsultancy’s Sri Sharma and her colleagues John Hillman and Matthew Ncube, this activity leaves a lot to be desired.
Pointing to an earlier study by WebCredible, Sharma notes that though Labour may claim to have bolstered its SEO strategy in the face of the Conservatives PPC budget, for the most part, the political party websites are extremely poor in terms of user experience. Here, the Lib Dem site was the only one praised for its design.
Moving on to paid search, Sharma writes that across all three parties there is “absolutely no understanding of how paid search can be used to tie everything neatly together and drive home a core message.”
The Conservatives are praised for running PPC campaigns on searches containing both ‘David Cameron’ and ‘Gordon Brown’ where Labour and the Lib Dems have no AdWords visibility whatsoever. However, the Conservatives are criticised for focusing solely on bidding. “They fail to make sure that the same keywords appear in their ad copy” says Sharma, “and the call to action is very poor indeed.”
However, the biggest criticism appears to be aimed at the Liberal Democrats. As the outside party, Sharma writes, “they should be the ones using the power of Google to even things up a bit.”
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