Health Reform Battle Is Not Cheap

Using digital media for advocacy is our bread and butter, so it came a shock to us how expensive buying space was recently on Google Adwords for our client Firedoglake. They have been advocating heavily for the public option to be included in the government’s plan to reform health care. Recently, though, the Senate through a curve ball and took out the public option and replaced it with a mandate forcing citizens to purchase private insurance plans. Forcing people to buy into junk policies from expensive private insurers or pay stiff penalties to the IRS, doesn’t sound like a fair trade off for the 30,000,000 Americans that could be helped by the public option. To try and inform Americans of this big difference between the House and Senate bills, Firedoglake has asked us to run a nationwide campaign on Google.com. The basic premise of advertising on Google is that someone types in a word and relevant ads appear on the far right of your search results page. Advertisers (or their agency -like us) bid on those key words, so that our ads will pop-up when you search a word of interest to our client. We ran into some very heavy competition for buying keywords when we built and launched this campaign today. We generally can do very well with keeping CPC (the cost it costs us every time a user clicks the ad) under $1, but today we were competing against keywords as expensive as $18 (“cheap health insurance plan”). For 1000 people to click that ad is going to cost some advertisers $18,000. That is a huge amount of money for such little impact. That left us in the office hypothesizing who in the world can pay that kind of money for ineffective advertising? Advocacy organizations can’t, nor should they be advised to. There are far better ways to spend $18,000. So who is behind the price spike on Google? We did a little cyber-sleuthing. We used our $18 keyword phrase “cheap health insurance plan” and click on the #1 ad on the search results page. This brought us to a nondescript website offering free quotes on health insurance plans. How does a website offering free services afford to drop thousands of dollars on online advertising? We dug a little deeper and found the owner of the website is All Web Leads marketing out of Austin, Texas. Biggest client – insurance agents. Doesn’t seem like rocket science that insurance companies would advertise, but the amount of money they are spending is astronomical. With the debate over health reform wagging on, we can only imagine how the market will continue to spike upwards.