UK.gov drops £6m on Google
Fat dollar spent on health advice sites
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Four Whitehall departments gave Google and similar search engines more than £6m in two years to encourage web users to do more exercise, emit less CO2 and stop smoking, among other initiatives.
Figures released this week show the Department of Health has been the biggest search spender, paying £4.4m to promote websites including on pandemic flu.
The Department for Communities and Local Government spent £758,000 on keywords related to its websites, including information on the scrapped Home Information Pack scheme. It also paid Google to push its "Eco-towns" initiative, an as-yet-unbuilt network of new town meant to promote environmentally-friendly development.
Meanwhile the Department of Energy and Climate Change spent £310,000 in just one year. As The Register reported earlier this year, that included bidding for climate change keywords against one of its own quangos, driving up the price per click.
The Department of Environment Food and Rural Affairs spent £540,000, also partly on CO2 reduction campaigns.
The figures were released in response to Parliamentary questions from Tory MP Damian Hinds.
Since coming to power the coalition has imposed a moratorium on government advertising spending, and an ongoing Cabinet Office review aims to slash 75 per cent of the government's 820 websites. ®
COMMENTS
But
Why where they wasting our money on all those tv ads as well ?
Especially the blatently political ones ?
Big problem. Total waste of taxpayers' money
WTF?
It just boggles my mind that the government seems to think it needs to tell us this kind of stuff and waste our money this way . . . .
Coming soon the new NHS ads reminding citizens that breathing is healthy . . . .
http://breathmore.nhs.gov.uk
What a colossal waste of money
I happen to be an AdWords campaign manager, but my monthly budget is only around 40k. I'm well aware of how easy it is to waste massive amounts of money on Google if the accounts are being managed by anyone without serious experience in PPC campaigns.
They probably didn't even geo-target their ads properly to make them shown only in the UK. I can imagine university kids in Brazil clicking on UK government ads telling them how to lose weight.
They probably do bid on terms where they rank well organically. They probably also spend a lot of money competing with themselves, as the article notes.
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