Campaign update

As I've mentioned before, I'm taking a non-traditional route to the campaign. Rather than "running" for Congress, I'm blogging for Congress.

I monitor traffic to the campaign website. The largest source is regular searches on Google (i.e. ones I don't pay for). Another big source is politics1.com. The two biggest paid sources are Google ads and ads that I'm running on the Times Union's website, through a company called adsonar.com.

An interesting question about the paid ads is whether the "impressions" are worth anything. If someone clicks on the ad and comes to the website, you'd hope that means they know more about me and my campaign. But the paid sources also measure impressions, meaning how many times my ads have been displayed to people. The mere fact that the ad shows up on the page doesn't mean a whole lot.

Anyway, I've had over 300,000 impressions on my main Google ad campaign, and over a million on the Times Union. These have led to a few hundred clicks to the website.

If we get over 2 million impressions by election day (which looks pretty likely), and only 2% stick, that's still 40,000 people. Maybe that's not a bad approach.

All of this for well under $1000. We'll see if that means anything in November.