• by Ross Fadner , December 4, 2008

The Obama campaign has been much-lauded for its use of the Internet and Internet marketing in building its brand and generating donations. How big a part did searchâ€"the biggest sector of online advertisingâ€"play in Obama’s winning bid for Presidency of the United States? That’s the question that researchers and agency executives pondered at today’s Search Insider Summit in Park City, Utah.

Emily Williams, Interactive Account Executive, for MSHC Partners, which managed the Obama team’s search marketing efforts, said that search was “a huge, huge part” of the campaign’s list-building strategy, in particular. “At times we found we couldn’t ramp it up enough,” Williams said. That may be so, but Corina Constantin, Director of Decision Sciences for Didit Labs, pointed out that John McCain’s campaign seemed to have a savvier approach to search. At one point, Nielsen estimated that McCain had 21.6 million search impressions versus 949,000 for Obama, Constantin said. However, that changed in October once the economy became a big issue: Obama started buying more issue-related keywords rather than brand-related keywords.

It turns out that issue-related keywords were an integral part of the McCain strategy all along, but these didn’t play well with Web users. Williams said the notion of persuasion versus reinforcement is what the Obama campaign understood. “We didn’t spend a lot of time on issue terms, because they weren’t converting,” she said. The Obama team also didn’t spend a lot of time buying opposition keywords. “It was more about the timeliness of it,” she said, depending on when certain things would happen in the campaign. Instead, the Obama campaign’s approach was all about building/reinforcing the brand to drive online donationsâ€"an area where the Obama team thumped the opposition.