Google Search Ads

Any organization or campaign that wants to drive public education on a specific candidate or issue and reach an audience who is already indicating some level of interest.

• A campaign with a small digital budget might use Google Search to ensure their site and message shows up at the top of the results page when users search for their candidate’s name.
• A campaign with a mid-sized digital budget might use Google Search to make sure their issue or candidate’s name is shown to people searching more generally about an issue or election.
• A campaign with a large digital budget might use Google Search to direct those searching for voting information to a polling place lookup tool.

• Gives you the chance to provide the first answer to a search
• Appearing to an audience of users who are already indicating interest in something relevant to your campaign, increasing the value of the ad as an answer but also ensures that traffic from search ads is of high quality
• Text only ads can save on creative production time
• Google provides automated reports with new keywords to optimize your campaign
• Quick way to build up presence in Google search results in the short term while SEO efforts are underway”

• Google Ads’s unintuitive user interface can be difficult to get used to
• Many settings that are necessary for successful campaign set up aren’t easy to find in the ads manager
• Character counts for ads are quite limited

• Google’s political ad policy covers ads about federal elections, state-level elections, federal or state level political parties, or state-level ballot measure, initiative, or propositions. Google’s political ad policy does not extend to news content or ads for products or services, including promotional political merchandise like t-shirts.
• In order to run political ads, Google requires that advertisers go through a simple verification process by filling out a form on their site, and they use that information to add a “paid for by” disclaimer onto an ad. The verification process takes 3-5 days.
• Additionally, Google restricts the ways that political advertisers can target their ad campaigns. For more, see the targeting section.
• All political ads and ad spending is publicly available in Google’s Transparency Report.

• Acquisition, but better for list building than fundraising for candidates without high name ID
• Awareness
• Mobilization

Typical pricing model: CPC

$1-5 CPC

Expect these CPCs to vary widely considering how many people might also be targeting the same keywords and how many people may be searching for your keywords.