When Theresa May announced the sudden general election, it left the major UK political parties a short amount of time in order to prepare and apply their campaign strategies.

It is clear that each party holds incredibly different views on how they see fit to govern the UK, but one thing Labour and the Conservatives agreed on was the investment in search marketing in order to compete to get their adverts in a prime time position at the top of search engine results pages.

Spending by the Conservative party rapidly grew since 26th May, following a week which saw massive criticism over the parties pensions policies. However, recent data from Adthena revealed that the cost per individual click utilised by the political parties as consistently been at the same level, with an average of £1.50.

Surprisingly, since the 26th May, central to the Conservative’s search ads have been Brexit, contrasting to Labour who had continually been pushing on the government’s dementia tax.

Both the Conservatives and Labour have endorsed different strategies, with Labour targeting the Conservatives pension u-turn and manifesto, and the Conservatives have been using Jeremy Corbyn’s recognised shortfall of negotiation skills to take care of Brexit.

The top ad from the Conservative party appeared on over 59 Brexit-related searches, receiving more than 100,000 impressions during the last two weeks of the election.

The Labour party was seen to continuously change their strategy during their election campaign period, attempting to take advantage of multiple trends during that time. This included search terms related to the Liberal Democrats and the Conservative Party manifestos.

The wide strategy the Labour party had taken varied in success for them, they did not see the same amount of impressions as the Conservatives did, who targeted smaller and more specific issues. Labour operated in a much larger search area than its rival, but, the Conservative party has steadily maintained the number of clicks and shares throughout. This proves that the Labour party could probably gain more success in the future by using a more specific strategy.

The more direct approach by the Conservatives did play into the success of the Conservatives, but they did, in fact, miss out on numerous moments by limiting themselves.

To be honest, the winner is difficult to judge. Clearly, the Conservatives came out on top, but with a hung parliament and Labour’s dramatic increase in seats, it is incredibly hard to state who’s marketing strategy was more successful.

With another election very possible it will be incredibly interesting in the future to see whether the political parties change and invest more in search and marketing.