Smallbrain Solutions

Politics (particularly political technology) has always been a few years behind commerce… slow to adopt TV, Direct Mail, the web. Thankfully, at least online, tactics and strategies are jumping the divide faster than usual. Honestly, I thought it wouldn’t have taken this long for people to start clicking on rival candidate’s cost-per-click ads to drive up their costs… Unfortunately, it finally did.

Mashable points to a reddit story suggesting that folks start clicking on Rudy’s google AdSense ads.

As anyone who has done CPC ads knows, fraud is pretty much part of the territory. Also, the ad providersdo offer solutions to fraud. So, if you see a huge surge in ad-clicks with a concurrent plummeting of conversions, you are very likely a victim (which should be fairly obvious). You can see google’s FAQ on click fraud here. If you feel that your AdSense ads are being abused, you can contact their click-quality team.

Don’t let this discourage you from trying paid search - it can be extremely cost-effective for building your email lists. Let us know if you want to get a program going.

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David All reports in on Slatecard’s progress. The republican version of ActBlue has raised almost $75k. Not too shabby… Considering the high profile of the folks involved not surprising that it would raise some money, but I had expected a bit more. Interestingly (to me), their average gift is $163.86. Holy crap, that’s high. ActBlue’s was $90.45 for the first three weeks of October.

That kind of tells you something.

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While I am still bullish on the Facebook ads in general, I think the platform needs some work. Fred Wilson points out some weird stats on his post friday and the test ads we put up last week aren’t performing well yet. But I still think they can make sense. Nick at AllFacebook.com isn’t so confident.

Basically, our test ads are targeting some very small groups - and they may be generating branding value without attracting clicks, much like paid search can. However, I think there may be some value shown if you can get it local enough and make the ask tied to a value-add like an action via an application. Heck, I even clicked on and ad for an apartment yesterday. And not even for research purposes… More to come, certainly. We have some requests to do some more testing for clients using bigger test groups - so our outlook will be changing based on those results.

Since I wasn’t blogging much this summer, here are some not-great stats-posts from Valleywag and Reach Students.

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Guilty. I’ve sent them. I just thought it was funny that I got two this week - an email from Bill Richardson’s campaign yesterday and a blog post from Tom Harkin’s campaign today.

Ok, there’s nothing wrong with the tactic. Nothing at all. The real reason for this post was to point out that we really need to step back and remember that we aren’t the audience for the appeals. We all know that, but we forget - like I did today. How many non-internet professionals are paying attention to the online outreach of Richardson and Harkin? Richardson supporters in Iowa, I guess… At any rate, just remember - what we think is lame, or tired doesn’t matter. Pay attention to your data. If something works, keep doing it. If not, change. If you are just doing it because EVERYBODY does it (like the message from the spouse) then you should rethink your strategy.

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Holy crap. Google may have solved the “unique visitor problem” with a Firefox extension that synchronizes your cookies across different machines. This is wild.

When we look at “Unique Visitor” in any modern cookie-based analytics package those of us who use multiple computers – a fair number – look like completely different visitors to most websites. Well, until we login with a user/password. However, the Google Browser Sync extension will solve that. Since all your cookies are tied together, you look like the same user. Sure, it doesn’t really do much for you as a user aside from letting sites remember you… but that is something, right?

On behalf of all the web analytics professionals out there, please add this today. And if you aren’t using Firefox, you are missing out! [via Clickz]

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