  In recent years there has been a growing interest in crowdsourcing
methodologies to be used in experimental research for NLP tasks. In particular,
evaluation of systems and theories about persuasion is difficult to accommodate
within existing frameworks. In this paper we present a new cheap and fast
methodology that allows fast experiment building and evaluation with
fully-automated analysis at a low cost. The central idea is exploiting existing
commercial tools for advertising on the web, such as Google AdWords, to measure
message impact in an ecological setting. The paper includes a description of
the approach, tips for how to use AdWords for scientific research, and results
of pilot experiments on the impact of affective text variations which confirm
the effectiveness of the approach.
