Political Campaign Tips and Strategies by Online Candidate

How Does Retargeting Grow Your Political Campaign?

Retargeting is a form of online advertising that allows you to serve ads to people who have visited your campaign website. A staple of big brands and small companies alike, retargeting is a powerful way to stay in touch with people who have demonstrated interest in the company. Recently, retargeting has entered the political sphere. Now an established tool for national campaigns, local and regional political campaigns have begun to catch on too.

How does retargeting work?

Retargeting depends upon a few simple lines of code placed within the HTML of your website. When people visit your site, the retargeting code is able to tag your visitors. After people leave your website, you can serve them your display ads all over the web.

Why does retargeting work?

Retargeting allows you to focus your ads on people you know are interested in what you have to say. For political campaigns, retargeting can help ensure that you are serving ads to your key constituency and voters who are actively researching candidates, allowing you to create a more focused set of ads. Retargeting can help keep interested voters engaged until the election, helping to increase awareness and voter turnout. As the election approaches, you can update your ads from a focus on candidate awareness and relevant issues to a focused call to get out and vote.

This targeted approach lets you develop campaign messaging geared toward more involved voters who already know who your candidate is and has an idea of what she stands for.

When should you use political retargeting?

Virtually all campaigns can benefit from retargeting. However, if your campaign website is relatively new and you’re still not seeing much traffic it could make sense to focus on bringing new traffic to your site. When it comes to bringing new traffic, targeted display advertising could be the right solution. Like retargeting, targeted display advertising helps focus your outreach on the people who you want to get in front of.

There are several variables you can use to target your ads including geographic and demographic variables, interest, and political affiliation. Depending on who you’re hoping to reach, any combination of these factors could be relevant to you. For example, in any local or state race, geographic targeting is likely to be a good option. Demographic targeting can encompass variables like age, income, gender, and occupation. You can include multiple data layers as well, for example you could target women over the age of 40, in California, who are affiliated with the Democratic party.

One of the primary benefits of ad targeting is the ability to show different messages to different groups, ensuring all your messaging is as relevant as possible.

Targeted and retargeted display ads are a great way to segment ads to likely or undecided voters, and to get the right message in front of the right voter.

Caroline Watts is a Marketing Associate at ReTargeter, a full-service display provider specializing in audience targeting and retargeting.

Fear And The Campaign Website

It’s tough enough to be a first-time candidate. Throw online campaigning and the whole computer thing into the mix, and it can be overwhelming. A lot of potential clients who contact us are really just nervous about starting a campaign website. Where to turn? Who can build it? Will it do what I need it to do? There are a lot of options out there, and trying to figure it all out can be paralyzing.

A lot of web firms are trying to break into the political sphere these days. Many of them bank on candidate’s fears (or ignorance) to get their business. These are the top concerns we hear from candidates who are new to the whole web/social media thing. If you are looking into your campaign’s online options, perhaps some of these fears may apply to you.

The fear of building a campaign website

A lot calls we get from potential clients are less about answering questions about our product and more about letting them know that, yes, we can get you up and running quickly and easily. Candidates don’t need to be sold on the idea of a campaign website anymore. They just know that they need one.

No matter what content management system (CMS) you use, there is a learning curve. Even though a basic installation of WordPress takes less than ten minutes for a decent web designer to set up, a person with limited computer experience is probably going to be overwhelmed by a website builder.

Add some plug-ins and customization, and it gets even more complicated and time-consuming.

And security? You better know how to keep your site secure. The only thing worse than an insecure WordPress site is fixing one after a hack!

We’ve worked to make our Online Candidate website system as streamlined as possible. Rather than burying the options and configuration across multiple tabs and pages, we centralized everything in one place (the Site Setup page). Pages can be named, tagged and edited all in one page. Forms, calendars or event lists can be easily added to any page.

The edit-save-generate functionality makes updates easy. It takes a few minutes to get familiar with our CMS, but we’re confident that our system is the easiest and fastest way to build a political campaign website.

The fear of making site updates

If you have a ‘static’ site that cannot be edited without an offline editor, then you are at the mercy of your web designer. That usually means that every time you need a change to the site, you are going to be charged. And don’t count on a fast turnaround time. The modern campaign moves too quickly for a one-to-two day turnaround for site updates.

Bad things happen when the web designer disappears and the campaign is unable to update the site or, worse, the domain name expires and website goes down – permanently. We’ve had candidates call us a few days before their election so they can get something up for the remainder of the campaign. Sometimes we are able to point the old domain name to their new website, but if the webmaster registered the domain in their own name, we have a problem.

Tip: Make sure your domain name is registered in your name. When we register domain names for campaigns, we always make sure the client is the registrant and owner of the domain.

You should be in control of your own website. Even if you do not do the updates, you should still have access to the site if you need it.

The fear of lack of support

Because a lot of our clients are not computer-savvy, a major concern is how they can get help if they are stuck. Most web firms either do not provide training (because they do the updates) or they will charge you for a run-though of making changes on the CMS. If you use a service, your support will usually be via email.

We’ve tried to make the Online Candidate system easy to use. On every page of our site administration is a help button that links to a relevant article with instructions in our extensive online knowledge base. If you still need help, you can send us a support ticket – or call us if you are in a bind!

There are also the articles on this site and even more resources and tools on OnlineCandidateResources.com.

First time running for office? Have questions about starting a website for your campaign? Call Carol at 845-926-3400.

Are You Measuring These Metrics On Your Campaign Website?

Knowing what your campaign website traffic does when it arrives at your site can help you tailor your web content for maximum effectiveness.

Google Analytics provides valuable information that allows you to find out where your web site visitors are coming from, what pages they are viewing, and what they do on your site. Here are three metrics to keep an eye on no matter what analytics program you are using.

Bounce Rate

The bounce rate is the percentage of single-page visits or visits where the visitor left your site from the entrance (or landing) page. Traffic sent to (donation or issue) landing pages, home page, and other internal pages will have different bounce rates.

Look at the pages with very high bounce rates. Is there are reason why people are not sticking around? Is there a call to action on the page? Is there enough content? Does the content match the traffic source? For example, if you are running a PPC campaign, are the ads pointing to the most relevant page on your site?

Average Page Views Per Visit

Your visitor’s overall engagement can be measured by how deep into your site they will go. The average page views per visit gives you an indication of how much interest your site holds for your visitors. When people find content that resonates, they will read more and tend to share that content with others. This ties into what content visitors see. If you find particular content is popular (such as issue pages), then you may want to create additional, similar content.

Average Time

This ties in with the other metrics. Are you reaching your visitors, and are your visitors spending time on your site? For example, you have a video on a page that is three minutes long, you’ll want to see that your audience has remained on the page for at least that long. Typically a high bounce rate will correlate with a low average time on the site, but not always.

Take a good look at your content when looking at your analytics. Try to see it through your visitor’s eyes, as if it’s the first page they see. Even better, have a neutral third party give you feedback on your site and page content.

Examining metrics on the page level will give you an idea of what content is most engaging to your audience and give you areas where you may want to change your content. Knowing what your visitors do is critical to understanding the effectiveness of your site and overall marketing strategy.

Analytics code can be easily be added to your Online Candidate website through the Site Setup. For more articles, information and tool about analytics and online campaigning, visit OnlineCandidateResources.com.

Political Messaging, Campaign Mission Statements, And Groupthink

There’s an old expression, “Too many cooks spoil the broth”. If you’ve ever written a campaign mission statement or campaign plan with a group of people, you know how a simple idea can become tweaked, pulled apart, and reassembled into a Frankenstein-like mess of vague goals, squishy feelings and half-baked ideas.

The same thing goes for campaign issue and advertising plans for local political campaigns: Over-analysis by a group can take simple idea can turn into on overreaching and broad goal that will only serve to confuse the voting public.

How to Write a Mission Statement That Doesn’t Suck [Video]

The average length of a political mission statement is less than 10 words. Is your campaign plan simple, effective and engaging? Can you tighten it up further and make it catchy tagline?

Is it concise like the mission statements and platforms of the major US political parties?

Subscribe below for campaigning tips and updates from Online Candidate.

Critical Elements of a Campaign Website Header

Create a great election website header Web users make snap decisions about the quality of a web page, so a nice design is critical for making an initial positive impression. The first part of a website that typically attracts the eye is the site header. Below are the most common features of successful politicalwebsite header images.

Candidate Photo: A candidate head shot is the most common feature in a campaign site header. Must be the nature of candidates, but there are few politicians who did not want their photo front and center. The best shots to work with are those with the subject in front of a solid color that contrasts with their clothing. This makes it much easier to crop and edit the image.

Colors and Fonts: The colors of the header and website should be consistent with the color scheme of any other campaign material that will be use. Consistency builds familiarity.

Location: This one gets missed sometimes, particularly the location. It’s great that the site is about ‘Smith for Mayor’, but mayor of where? Never assume that a visitor knows where you are located. Your municipality should be included the header. For SEO purposes, you should also include both the municipality and state somewhere in the body text of your pages.

Sample Website Header Designs

See our political website design examples.

Slogan or Quote: This is optional, but if you have a great campaign slogan, why hide it? Incorporate it into the header image.

Landmarks: Readily identifiable natural or man-made landmarks make a great addition to a header, particularly when used as a background. State flags or seals also make for good backgrounds, but if you plan to use them, make sure you can do so.

The size of header, particularly its height, can vary from site to site. When we started creating Online Candidate back in 2004, most of our sites were quite narrow, perhaps a hundred pixels tall. Today we tend to make them as least twice as tall, and a candidate head shot now usually includes the shoulders and chest. Part of this is simply keeping up with online design trends, and also the fact that the average screen resolution is higher than it used to be.

Learn more about our Campaign Website Packages to create an effective, professional web presence that helps win elections. Our Regular and Enhanced Website Packages include custom design!

Creating an Online Political Press Kit

Political campaign press kit with candidate information Online political press kits are helpful in that basic campaign information can be kept in one place, and the information is easily accessible. Press kit material can be added to its own section on your campaign website or incorporated into your contact page.

Traditionally, digital press kits are built into a series web pages where the goal is to advertise the site. Using that format on a campaign website is a little redundant, since you are not looking for advertisers, and the point of the site is to sell the candidate. Instead, a campaign press kit is designed to create digestible information that can be easily downloaded by voter and reporters and incorporated into media coverage about your campaign.

So what goes into a political online press kit? It depends, really. Unlike a physical press packet, an online press kit can be broken up to be downloaded in part or in whole. PDFs work well as a common file format for documents.

You can save your files as PDFs through Word, or you can convert them through a free tool like PrimoPDF. Images can be grouped together and compressed into ZIP files. WinZip is a popular compression program, but there are free alternatives available such as jzip.

A political campaign press kit includes:

A cover letter describing the candidate and campaign.
A candidate biography. Don’t forget to add a photo and related web links.
Press releases from the organization.
Digital copies of logos, brochures, flyers, etc.
Photographs of the candidate and events from the campaign trail. Offer several versions for download. Low-res files can be used for web, but print requires larger images with higher resolution.
Newspaper or other media excerpts. Rather than reprinting the material outright, you could create a document or PDF file with links.
A Question and Answer sheet covering the major issues. This should include standard platform information and cover basic questions.

Avoid fluff about how great the candidate is. Keep the press material professional and up to date. You don’t need to necessarily link to your files. You can keep them private and only provide direct download links when necessary.

A PR kit can also be created for events. Again, this is packet of information meant to inform the media about a fundraiser, meeting or public debate. This may contain much of the same content as your regular kit, but tailored with additional background or press release information about the event.

To quickly get your material into the hands of the media, reach out early. Find out what reporters cover your area and send them a quick introduction and contact information, letting them know where they can find up-to-date information about your campaign. Remind reporters of your online press kit following candidate interviews or when you are submitting press releases. Anything you can do to make a journalist’s job easier is helpful and, if you’re lucky, may lead to better media coverage.