Australian Election 2010 – all the main parties use Google Adwords extensively for promoting their spending programs and initiatives, but during the current election different tactics are being used. There were several reports over the weekend of candidates complaining as ads for other parties were showing up around their results. For example Sally-Anne Brown, an independent candidate, was surprised to see a liberal ad at the top of the results according to the Age. Was she disappointed to not find herself in the organic results?

This is an interesting negative tactic, but quite legitimate under Google’s guidelines. This negative advertising could well backfire though – in this example, although the liberals have targeted Sally-Anne’s name as an independent, the rest of the ad is about Labor cost, and the ad links to the Economy section of Liberal party site with unsurprisingly no mention of Sally-Anne.

It is doubtful the quality score is very high for this, so will be costing more per click than an ad to Sally-Anne Browns landing page with more relevant content in the ad would. Also it wouldn’t take much for Party workers from other parties to click the ads out of existence each day as the daily bid was reached – even though this would be click fraud, it is possible the parties could do this if they were savvy enough.

So who wins? Not the voter, as it’s confusing – for example, if the voter knows the name of the candidate but not which party they are. Also doesn’t give a great impression of the parties, people are fed up of negative advertising and quite possibly don’t expect it in their search results. On a more positive note, it is a good signal to candidates to improve the ranking of their own sites or party pages so they are high in the organic results and also to use Adwords to their own benefit. But the real winner is undoubtedly Google as the party dollars flow in from each ad clicked.