For those of us working in search engine marketing, our goal is to get our message out to not just the right number of people, but the right kinds of people. And if we feel the strain from this challenge, imagine how the 2008 presidential candidates must have felt.

John McCain and Barack Obama both knew that Hispanics were a potential swing factor for the presidential election this year. Hispanics are the nation’s largest and fastest growing minority group; with an estimated 46 million they make up 15% of the U.S. population (Pew Hispanic Center, 2008). In 2008 Latinos compromised 9% of the eligible electorate nationwide and were estimated to make up about 6.5% of the total of voters this year.

Not only were Hispanics a potential swing factor, but they 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 as of 2008, and they spend more time online than watching TV or reading newspapers and magazines.

With these kinds of numbers you’d think both McCain and Obama put big time resources into reaching them on the web via pay-per-click search ad campaigns. This was not the case.
Some may blame this on political affiliation – Hispanics for a long time have leaned toward the Democratic Party. 57% of Hispanic registered voters call themselves Democrats with just 23% aligning with Republicans – a 34% gap in partisan affiliation among Latinos (Pew Hispanic Center, 2008). Perhaps both candidates feel their resources are better spent elsewhere?

Well, not exactly. Obama spent over $3 million on Google ads, with a bulk of that most likely going towards search and contextual ads. McCain did not released figures for his online ad spending but we can assume it was lower than Obama, probably somewhere in the $1 to 2 million range.

Back in September, Valleywag dug up data from HitWise and found the keywords the candidates were buying on Google. While many keywords are the same in English and Spanish (Palin, John McCain, Obama), both candidates were bidding for keywords related to specific components of their campaigns (gas prices, obama taxes, mccain energy).

In order to look deeper into the candidates’ Hispanic SEM strategy, we took the time to plug in all the keywords that both McCain and Obama used in their English search campaigns, but in Spanish. Only three showed up for Obama and none for McCain. The three Spanish keywords that the Obama campaign bid on were “biografia obama”, “obama sitio official”, and “barack obama presidente.” However, the ad executions were in English and took the user to the English version of the donation page of the Web site (both Obama and McCain have Spanish versions of their site).

Next, we went to Google’s keyword tool to look up some keywords in Spanish that, had the two candidates had a 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 (that is, Latin America and Spain). Since the number of Hispanic Internet users in the U.S. is 23 million, we are assuming that close to 21% of the Spanish-language searches in the world originated in the U.S. The keywords we chose to analyze are:
• Elecciones (5,691 searches/month) – Elections
• Petroleo (3,801 searches/month) – Oil
• Inmigracion (23,100 searches/month) – Immigration
• Impuestos (3,108 searches/month) – Taxes
• Educacion (15,540 searches/month) – Education
• Guerra (315,000 searches/month) – War
• Gasolina (12,705 searches/month) – Gasoline/Gas
• Elecciones presidente (1,134 searches/month) – president elections
• Encuestas elecciones 2008 (1,134 searches/month) – polls elections 2008

If we take a conservative 2% average CTR for ads on Google the number of clicks per month for each keyword would have been:
• Elecciones: 113
• Petroleo: 76
• Inmigracion: 462
• Impuestos: 62
• Educacion: 310
• Guerra: 6,300
• Gasolina: 254
• Elecciones presidente: 23
• Encuestas elecciones 2008: 23

Which brings the total number of visits per month each candidate missed for not bidding on these 9 keywords to 7,623.

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. Did this turn out to be a factor on Election Day? Probably not the deciding factor, but nonetheless a factor to be considered by politicians in the future.

Ramiro Padilla, Digital Strategist, Sensis
Rob Kallick, SEM Coordinator, Sensis

This entry is filed under Search Engine Marketing, advertising, demographics, hispanic, interactive, marketing, media, multicultural, online, politics, research. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.