Of the $3.47 million Barack Obama spent on Internet advertising from January through April, over 80% of it has gone in to the coffers of Google Inc., according to information released by the Federal Election Commission. In contrast, Yahoo received about $352,000 and Microsoft received $73,000.

After spending $640,000 in January, Obama pumped his Internet spending to nearly $2 million in February, likely due to the big Super Tuesday battles waged in that month. He tapered spending off to $888,000 in March and although not all the reporting is in for April, he reduced spending significantly in that month as well.

Much of the spending on Google appears to have been spent on AdWords, although specific numbers aren’t yet known for sure. ClickZ, the source of this story, did not receive a response from the Obama campaign about the FEC filings.

Obama has focused on performance based ads, paying on a cost-per-action system. Besides Google, he also utilized Yahoo search ads, Pulse 360, Drive PM, Specific Media, and Quigo, in addition to direct buys on Politico.com and CNN.com.

Amongst the social networks, Facebook beat out MySpace by a 4 to 1 clip, garnering $47,000 from the campaign compared to MySpace’s $11,500.

What does this teach us? Obama’s campaign has gained a reputation for being the most tech-savvy of the presidential campaigns by a very significant margin. The fact that Obama’s people have devoted such a heavy amount of their resources to Google search ads tells us that they really believe search advertising is the most effective medium for them to advertise online with. Also, in spite of MySpace’s higher overall traffic, the Obama campaign spent far more money advertising on Facebook, apparently believe that Facebook’s demographics and ad quality were superior to MySpace’s.

Thanks to Kate Kaye of the ClickZ Network for the story.

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 29th, 2008 at 1:22 pmand is filed under Search Engine Marketing, Social Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.