Both of the conventions are over, and the US electorate has only two more months of campaign misery to endure. Television commercial spots attacking Obama and McCain will saturate the airwaves from now until early November. Those who’ve gotten sick of it all could turn to the Web, but even that is no longer necessarily a safe haven from partisan mudslinging. The election which has embraced online social networking has also been a boon to contextual advertising, particularly Google.

Here are some interesting figures on the campaigns’ spending and performance on online advertising:

• The majority of Obama’s online ad spend—59%, or $3 million—from January through July of this year, was spent on Google ads. Yahoo followed with $618K, and local advertiser Centro a bit more than half a million dollars. [ClickZ]
• ComScore data shows that for the first half of this year, the Obama campaign paid for 12 times as many display ads as the McCain campaign. [MarketWatch]
• Nielsen Online data points to heavier spending by the McCain campaign on search advertising compared to the Obama campaign. June saw 7 million search ad impressions from McCain, and 1.15 million from Obama. [National Journal] The gap widened in July, when McCain paid for 15.1 million search ad impressions, while Obama barely budged at 1.2 million. [WSJ]
• ‘Typo-squatted’ domains (like barckobama.com or johnmcain.com) are squirreling away online spend. A Symantec study showed that 47 of the 160 misspelled variants of Obama’s site were held by typo-squatters. [AFP].

Naturally, advertising is only one part of the candidates’ presences online, but growing spend demonstrates both its effectiveness and the growing traffic directed at the two candidates.

This entry was posted on Friday, September 5th, 2008 at 2:32 pm and is filed under Online Advertising. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.