e.politics: online advocacy tools & tactics

C is for Cookie: Why Do I Keep Seeing the Same Allen West Political Ad?

Hot on the heels of yesterday’s Great Guest Author Roundup, a new stallion has joined the herd! Check out Derek Pangallo’s political advertising extravaganza below, inspired by an Allen West ad on Epolitics.com. Today’s Part One focuses on cookie-based political ad retargeting and originally appeared on DerekPangallo.com; we’re promised a Part Two soon.

Why Do I Keep Seeing the Same Political Ad?

By Derek Pangallo

Browsing around over at Epolitics.com, an online political advocacy blog by Colin Delany, I was treated to the Allen West ad you see on the right.

This is the first in a two-part series on political advertising. In this post, I’ll focus on Adwords, Adsense, and retargeting cookies. In part two I’ll tear apart this ad in particular, and talk about the best ways to solicit online donations. Also have a look at my album of Facebook political ads.

If you didn’t know, Congressman West is the controversial Tea Party Freshman member of The House of Representatives for Florida’s 22nd district. Most recently he’s been criticized for sending a scathing email to fellow Representative Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, a gentle lady also from Florida.

One more quick disambiguation: Adsense is the Google service used to make money from ads on your site. Adwords is the Google service used to buy and place ads on the ‘net. Today, 97% of Google’s revenue comes from Adwords (down from 99% in 2008).

Why am I seeing the Allen West ad?

Colin didn’t make a deal with Allen West to put this ad on his site. He added Javascript from Google Adsense that automatically finds and displays ads “relevant” to the content of his site. When the ads get clicked, Colin makes some money in his Google Adsense account [Ed. note: not nearly enough!].

How are ads targeted?

Adwords advertisers can specifically target their ads, like the West billboard. Millions of sites use Adsense to make money, so there is many a niche to be found. You can specify what keywords should be on the sites where your ad will be shown, explicitly exclude sites (that might not be favorable to you), and narrow users by their physical location. There are plenty of pre-formatted geographies to choose from, like state, city, county, etc., but you can also draw your own area for the ad to be shown. In this case I’m making an ad to be shown just to people who live and/or work “inside the beltway”:

So to take a long way to answer the question, I am probably seeing this ad because team West is targeting ads toward users in DC who are surfing political-related sites. Good on ya. But, there is one more devious and highly-effective trick that the advertisers may be employing: retargeting cookies.

(more…)

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Feasting on the Brains of the Young

Mmmmmm, delicious brains…tonight I’m heading over to Georgetown to talk with one of Alan Rosenblatt’s grad classes on digital politics. These discussions are usually great, and I typically learn at least as much from the students as they do from me, which is ideal in my book.

And in tonight’s conversation, “my book” is exactly what I’ll have in mind, at least the e-book variety — I’ve seen a steady uptick in traffic to both the Obama campaign book and “Winning in 2010″ over the last couple of months, which makes sense as 2012 gets closer. The Obama book stands as-is, since it’s a look back at What Happened, but it’s time to put out a new version of “Winning,” this time focused on, you guessed it, using the internet to win in the 2012 elections. I’m planning to get together with a bunch of folks in the field over the next few weeks to gather perspectives, and the first set of ideas I plan to steal are those of Alan’s students. Mmmmmm, delicious brains….

– cpd

Add comment July 28th, 2011 Trackback Bookmark on del.icio.us