Undercover AdWords

Background

Predator Watch was a division of Children of the Street Society, founded to try to eliminate child and youth sexual exploitation online.

The problem was, many sexual predators felt that they could search for, find and view child pornography on the internet despite the restrictions Google had placed with AdWords to inhibit them.

Idea

To reach this very particular target audience, Google was persuaded to relax its strict policies so that predators searching for 'naked kids', 'nude preteens', 'underage boys' etc. were delivered warning messages in AdWords.

Every time one of them Googled one of Predator Watch's search terms, they were served up an AdWord that was specific to their exact search term, a reminder that undercover officers were online.

These ads were exactly the right message at the right time to deter predators.

Results

Here are the results from the highest performing Google AdWords over the past 3 months:

• naked boys: 71 clicks, 6857 impressions, CTR 1.04%
• naked kids: 9 clicks, 1318 impressions, CTR .68%
• nude preteens: 5 clicks, 139 impressions, CTR 3.6%
• underage kids: 4 clicks, 187 impressions, CTR 2.14%

Our Thoughts

There are many things I like about this. For starters, it isn’t a one-off from an agency looking to pat itself on the back for a good deed but part of a campaign in which there were over 650 workshops delivered last year to both schools and parents’ groups about the dangers

that lurk online. For another thing, the question asked was: ‘how can we stop these monsters from searching?’ rather than: ‘how can we do a great ad?’ The answer turned out to be surprisingly simple and all the better for it.

Someone somewhere might know how many clicks there have been on the relevant search terms Children of the Street bought but irrespective of the numbers, every one of those clicks will have been a journey shortened, an online trawl for depravity brought to an abrupt halt.