How to Hit Trump Where He Hurts… in the Wallet

Using Google Adwords against the Trump organization

I recently read the book Chaos Monkeys by Antonio Garcia Martinez about what it’s like to live in the insane startup world in Silicon Valley. At one point in the book Martinez talks about Google AdWords and how important they were to a fledgling startup. He goes on to say that, at the time of publishing the book, the most expensive search term in Google AdWords was mesothelioma. And if one searched on that term and clicked the ad, the owner of that ad would be charged close to $100. Martinez also went onto to pontificate about the costs that the advertiser would incur if someone just felt like clicking the link.

That got me thinking about what if people wanted to, they could use Google AdWords for a similar reason.

How Google ADwords works

Every time someone does a search on Google, an AdWords auction is created. Every advertiser who has a keyword match to the search query competes in the auction. How well each advertiser competes is based on their Ad Rank. Using this slightly simplified version:

Ad Rank = Quality Score * Bid

Ads are then placed in order based on Ad Rank. The highest Ad Rank gets the top spot and so on down to either the last ad qualifying for the auction or the last position on the page.

For example if we search through Google…

>Hotel Chicago Luxury

Google will award to the highest bidder, the ad to display on its search results. The winner will have the highest ad rank will be first, the second highest ad rank will be second, and so forth.

The company that has the first result will pay the most. For some ads, that may not be much, let’s say a quarter or so. But others, like Hotels and Air flights, are competitive. And the winner of the bidding war for “Hotels Chicago Luxury” may pay, for example, $1.25 for that result.

The kicker is, the winning bidder pays for click-throughs. That means, when someone clicks the ad and goes to the site, then the winning bidder will pay for each click-through.

Simple enough, right? Search for something in Google, click on the first search result with Google AdWords and that company will be charged a click-through amount.

Now what if someone applied it to Trump.

For example, say you want to search for a hotel in Chicago. And you search for:

>trump hotel Chicago

The results will be something like this:

Notice the Google Adword logo in the result listing. That indicates that the result is a Google Adword listing and if you click, the company will be charged.

So that means, if someone were to do few simple searches and click-through to Trump hotels or Trump Properties, the Trump organization will be charged for that click-through.

Now it may not feel like that much money but if that winning bid is, let’s say for the sake of the argument, $1.25 for the click-through, then if a million people search and click-through at the Google AdWord logo result for Trump companies, they would be charged $1,250,000.

I did some random, manual Google searches and found that the following list of Google Searches will return Google Adwords results for Trump Hotels.

>trump hotel las vegas
>trump hotel vancouver
>trump hotel waikiki
>trump hotel toronto
>trump hotel miami

I guess Martinez didn’t realize it when he wrote it, but it’s possible that if enough people did these searches, it could be another form of protest. Well, at the very least, you’d get to see what a Trump Hotel looks like.