But according to recent AdWords number crunches, BP is only paying an average of $1.33 per click or roughly $1 million each month (SearchEngineWatch, June 9). Perhaps as low as $1.22 per click.

Why so little? Nobody has been outbidding them in the AdWords marketplace. It’s time for some guerrilla tactics.

Here’s what I propose: Google should donate any revenues above $5 per click for any keyword to funds and charities dedicated to restoring the Gulf and/or to benefit those whose livelihoods have been shattered as a result of the Deepwater Horizon BP Oil Spill.

Yes, this is a crazy idea and it could throw AdWords of its hinges. So let’s just do it for ONE DAY. Google can’t change the rules for specific keywords but they can change the rules across the board. All it would take is a few noble souls willing to launch a bidding war with BP up to say – $20 per click. And Google’s word that monies will be donated (a great PR move in itself).

Justice is: clicking a search result and having $15 transfer BP to a non-profit Oil Spill fund. With each and every click!

Would millions of clicks accrue? ABSOLUTELY. Tens or hundreds of millions? I don’t know what the record is for most click-throughs from a Google Ad in one day. But I do know that Google has staged similarly engaging (and distracting) campaigns as recently as last month. We wasted nearly 5 million man-hours playing with Google’s PacMan 30th anniversary tribute, according to one report. BP has already wasted at least $50 million on TV ads. Why not make BP put its ad money where it should?

BP Logo mashup via Greenpeace UK‘s Behind the Logo flickr set.

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?