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Searching For Referendum Treaty Answers

Tuesday, May 15, 2012 8:54

If you’ve walked through Dublin recently, or any decent sized Irish town, you’ll probably have noticed that there is a referendum coming up. Because despite the fact that the issues covered by the upcoming referendum are incredibly complicated the campaigning strategy of both sides seems to be slap a poster on every lamp-post you can find.

But in a country which, despite all the challenges of the recession, now has smartphone penetration approaching 50%, and where the vast majority of the population uses the web at least once a week, one has to wonder whether such a strategy is really keeping up with the voters it’s trying to reach.

According to Google’s AdWords tools, there are, depending how you measure them, somewhere in the region of 15,000 searches every month for phrases relating to the referendum. However those numbers are averages, so it is likely that, as the referendum approaches (May 31st), there will be many more, at least based on recent growth in those searches.

So, what would someone searching for information find? Not a lot, at least not much from the interested parties.

A search for ‘referendum‘ returns, in the organic results, the official websites for the Referendum Returning Officer and Referendum Commission, as well as the normal mix of wikipedia pages and newspaper articles. But what if people want to find out how the Treaty is likely to affect them? Across a number of searches for this term, over two days, we saw ads for the aforementioned Referendum Commission; ads for the Institute of International and European Affairs, a major think tank, with a click taking people to a comprehensive section detailing what might happen depending on which way the vote goes; one encouraging a No vote (Leave The Euro, Vote No, which appears to have been set up by a concerned citizen); and one driving visitors to the site SpunOut, which is a youth charity.

The only one of the major players involved in the referendum to have an ad showing was stabilitytreaty.ie, which is run by the Department of the Taoiseach. Interestingly, whilst the Taoiseach is obviously campaigning for a ‘Yes’ vote, the site itself is very neutral in tone, meaning that there are no serious efforts to promote either a yes or no vote showing in the ads.

A search for fiscal treaty again has the IIE ad, alongside the Referendum Commission and stabilitytreaty.ie with the organic listings once again made up almost entirely of news stories.  When searching for fiscal treaty referendum, stabilitytreaty.ie appears again, as well as the same ‘No’ site we saw in the search for referendum appears at the bottom of the page. However, there are far few searches for that term than for just ‘fiscal treaty’.

Finally, a search for ‘austerity‘, a word which has, for many, come to define the issues that the treaty aims to deal with (and receives far more searches than something like ‘fiscal treaty referendum’), has no ads showing against it with organic listings almost entirely made up of news articles.

So, what can we, or the major political parties, learn from this?

• Firstly, that people are using Google to find the answers to incredibly complex political and economic issues in exactly the same way that they use it to find out the weather or a cheap flight.
• Secondly, that if you wish people to find your views on such matters, it’s important that you think about the words that they will use to phrase such searches (fiscal treaty not fiscal treaty referendum), and accept the fact that they might not be words you want to be associated with (austerity).
• Thirdly, that, in this day and age, expecting people to make a decision based on a piece of card tied to a lamp-post, when it’s really not that difficult to optimise a basic site, or set up a PPC campaign, is perhaps an indication that politicians are as out of touch as many people fear. Although the Department of the Taoiseach and one ‘No’ website showed a couple of times, they would often disappear depending on what time I checked the searches, suggesting budgets are not being managed well, and suggesting that even those who understand that search matters are still lacking when it comes to these (pretty basic) tactics.

NB: This is not meant as an opinion on the rights or wrongs of the treaty, or any of the parties. 

All searches were carried out on Google.ie using the plugin designed to remove personalised results. As most results are now personalised, whether due to location, social signals or any one of a number of other factors, this is the best way of trying to gauge an average view. Searches were carried out across two days (14-15 May, 2012) to allow for campaign settings such as budget or time of day.