How Much is McCain Paying to Advertise on This Blog? Will it Be Easy to Block Such Ads?

I had to chuckle this morning when I revisited a year-old post about Lara Logan (it’s been receiving traffic lately in the aftermath of her appearance last week on The Daily Show) and found this John McCain for President Google image ad at the bottom of the page:

SearchEngineWatch points to a couple interviews in which Google Ad execs predict that both candidates Obama and McCain will depend heavily on Adwords bidding wars and that the Clinton campaign was inconsistent with it’s usage of Google’s Adsense and Adwords platforms.

According to Adsense’s cost-estimate tool, the keyword Obama costs an estimated $0.88 – $1.23 per click (CPC). So, essentially the party who wishes to advertise on a website contextually relevant to the keyword “Obama” would have to outbid other potential advertisers. “Barack Obama” scored similarly on estimated CPC, but the estimated CPC for “McCain” is $1.23 – $1.85 — signficantly higher, implying that someone is driving up the bidding to advertise on websites/blogs featuring the word “mccain.” It comes as little surprise to find Barack Obama ads at the bottom of my posts that feature McCain. Yet, in the instance of the Lara Logan post, I’m betting that the McCain ad was picking up the “Iraq” keyword and advertising on that (Obama-related posts appear to be plastered with pro-Obama Google ads).

Now it *should* be easy for me to block this particular McCain ad by simply taking the root URL that the ad links to and adding it to the Adsense content filter. That said, any intelligent campaign would be sure to barrage the ‘net with ads from a multitude of unique URLS and IP addresses.

Have you had any great success / embarrassments in attempting to maintain open contextual ads in the face of occasional ad content that surreptitiously hijacks relevant keywords for competitive gain?