Volunteer needed: help monitor Google Adwords spending
The buying up of Google Adwords is fast becoming the new version of, or at least comparable to, posting election leaflets though peoples doors. This, for example,was the search results page for ‘Vince Cable’ just after the ‘Ask The Chancellor’ debates on Channel 4 this evening:
As you can see the Conservatives are buying up Adwords for the Lib Dem Shadow Chancellor. Nothing wrong with that, but what else is being brought and by by whom? Who’s spending what? Are there any really specific words that parties are buying up that only small numbers of people will ever think to search for but will convey niche messages?
Currently we have no way of knowing, but here’s an idea of how we could monitor it:
1) Write a script that grabs the days hot topic terms from various web pages. These might include:
- headlines or term extraction the press release pages of the main party webpages
- headlines or term extraction from bbc news politics front page
- term extraction from the Wikipedia page about the 2010 election
- names of PPCs from YourNextMP.com
- constituency names form TheyWorkForYou.com
- the YouGov leaderboard
run the script once or twice a day and add any new terms you find into a database table.
2) Write a script to do a google search once or twice a day using all the terms in the database and if there are any adwords on the results page that link to a (major) party website store them in a second database table.
If you fancy having a go at this please get in touch! It can be in any language you like and we can work out how to integrate it into The Straight Choice later.