DWP spent £1m on search engine 'biasing' in single year
The Department for Work and Pensions has spent more than £1.1m on search engine biasing over the last four years. In a parliamentary written answer, work and pensions minister Chris Grayling revealed that the highest recorded costs were for 2009-10, when his department spent £956,000 on search engine biasing. The figure for the …
"Disproportionate cost"? That's fucking rich. What exactly do the DWP need all that SEO/PPC for? The websites are crammed with content - if that doesn't make them first then there's someone in need of firing.
It's not as bad as some of the IT moneywanking though.
It's not like there is any competition.
Why?
Because of the number of (l)users who can't do anything on the internet without typing it into Google. I have seen people who even type URLs into Google to go to a website. Paying Google & the others to have a link to the DWP when people enter relevant search terms sounds like making their on-line services easily available to the masses, which is what they are supposed to do.
It's also unfortunate that it isn't that obvious which faceless government department you need for what and you might have to resort to an internet search to find out.
Why? God almighty, why do they do it???
Other end user IT crimes you wish you had gouged your eyes/ears out before witnessing:
- trying to use the monitor like an ipad screen (normally your own pristine, freshly cleaned one)
- Printing emails they'd just sent (in duplicate)
- Trying to use MS word as an internet browser
- Turning off the PC by...turning it off. Literally. At the wall plug.
- Sticking a pen in the rear power supply fan of a colleagues PC because "it was noisy"
- Complaining about a PC that no longer works...eglecting to mention they accidentally emptied an entire cup of coffee into it.
- Dragging emails from outlook onto to their desktops as "storage"
- Using the trash bin as a storage bin
and best of all...(a mac user)...
"I tried to delete all the files on the server, by dragging the server drive to the bin, but they keep coming back the next morning when I log on". It's wrong on so many levels.
Grenade...you just would, wouldn't you.
Let's assume the average wage in the UK is 25K - not sure what it really is, must be about that.
Let's use an online income tax calculator to find that's about £5800 per year. This is a simple example so we're not including all the other taxes that the average citizen pays, such as VAT, Road tax yadda yadda.
£1,100,000 / 5800 = 190 normal joes working their godforsaken soul crushing 9-5 jobs every year just to have their tax spent on one government department bumping it's name up search engine rankings? Not exactly a great use of that cash is it?
Mental. The people holding the purse strings clearly had no respect at all for us. Every one of those 190 normal joes could have done a lot with that 5 grand.
How about the Clueless Carbon Trust bidding against the bungling muppets at DECC for the same Google Adwords on carbon and environment?
Carbon Trust were then funded by DEFRA whilst DECC is the new government money pit department set up to inflict the Carbon Rearrangement Commitment upon business and drive it out of the UK.
So, some normal Joes were working and paying tax so that some civil servant types could bid against each other to market their departments which were supposed to be doing the same thing. Perhaps we could publish the actual penis size of all those involved....
Can anyone answer the two simple questions:
Why does the DWP advertise?
What is it they are selling that requires advertising?
The DWP has a strategy to increase the number of on-line claimants so it does kind of make sense to esnure that if someone searches on "Job seekers Alllowance" DWP is at the top of the tree.
They're trying to move the citizen out of the job centre into claiming on-line 'cos there's an enormous overhead saving.
Downside is that it makes it easier for Mrs Fat Lazy Sod to claim her benefits without getting off her big fat arse though.
> figures for Google and other search engine providers were not available, and extracting them would result in a "disproportionate" cost
Yes, it must be terribly expensive to log into your adwords account and see how much you've spent. Or to look through the computerised invoices to see how much was paid out.
Meanwhile,. what would be much more interesting would be to get some measure of how effecitve those PPC and keyword purchases were - and which ones they had taken.
So far as the smell goes: I don't think it's horses, or sheep but it could just be the bull.
I think they knew a budget freeze was coming, so they hiked up the budget so it would get frozen at the higher level.
Beer, because they have to spend the money on something if it's not adwords
With the kind of Authority and Pagerank of the DWP domain, they can rank for any keywords they want organically with no problem at all.
Why would they spend a penny on PPC?
DWP spent 1.1 million having to pay for CPC when it took me 30 seconds to discover they have issues with H1 tags and canonical errors on their landing page.
its a simple 10 minute task to pay a n00b to sort that out and their would go from 8th to 2 or 3rd in Google almost immediately with the speed a PR7 site is indexed
They've made it to 2nd now when I searched for 'DWP'.
That despite the competition from the Department of Water and Power, perhaps where they detected a need to spend big.
Still, number one is a foreign bank.
CPC (cash per click) does not affect your ranking on the search engines. its a single payment more akin to straight advertising.
They could have hired a £200 a day SEO gimp for one day to improve their rankings, saving 1.0999 million in the process..
These revelations simply demonstrate a complete disregard for the tax payer, an arrogance that simply highlights their mealy-mouthed speeches and how false their claims to be looking after the less fortunate in society were.
No tax money should be used to shape opinion and all publicly funded opinion poles should be published with 3o days of their completion.
Few endeavours such as this can be achieved at a lower cost by using civil servants.
Unless you have some kind of context on what was being paid for this is fairly meaningless stuff. Considering how expensive TV advertising is, this was probably quite cheap. The DWP cover everything from the CSA to pensions to catching benefit cheats - I'd imagine they have quite a need for advertising.
"Considering how expensive TV advertising is, this was probably quite cheap."
Ah, the true voice of the public-sector parasite. See above for a calculation of how many working people are skinned to pay for your "cheap" little extravagance.
The fact that you can imagine even more lavish ways to waste our taxes doesn't make this one acceptable.
The Govt Dept where I work (anonymous, obviously) used to do this a few years back. More accurately, they outsourced part of their PR and the stupid PR company decided Adwords was a really good idea for terms where we were already top of Google.
Fortunately, someone listened to someone and this bright idea was eventually retracted. The PR was un-outsourced at about the same time.
One reason for a government office to take particular care with their appearance in search engines, Google and other - and not necessarily even to fake themselves higher in search results, only to establish that when you want to find web pages with a view to interacting with or learning about the DWP, "our" DWP that is, then their own pages will appear high ranked - one reason is that opportunistic third parties set up privately operated official-looking front-ends to government services, and try to get -those- high ranked. And then those front-ends do things like charging you a fee for filling in free forms, or giving you a premium-rate phone number which either connects to a free public office number, or lets you hear free government leaflet being read aloud to you.
So vulnerable people, in particular, are getting ripped off - not necessarily with an actual crime being committed, except in terms of morality. It was covered recently on BBC Radio 4's "Moneybox" show.
Doesn't the El Reg style guide require "spunked" rather than "spent"?
F**K me! This is the problem with civil service agencies no accountability, they can choose to spend however much they want on the particular objective.
What would it have been next year, £2 million?
Talk about misappropriate use of funds!
But you see, I don't honestly believe people actually go want to work for organisations like the DWP, the unemployment offices, I believe people 'fall' into the jobs and don't plan their careers to go work in these kind of organisations.
Two points:
The first is that you say claiming online is a big reduction in overhead for the DWP.
I disagree. I had to sign-on not so long ago. I did it by telephone, I then had to go for an 'interview' with DWP at the job centre where they sat me down for around 20mins and simply verified the information on all the forms I have previously given.
Even if you complete the application for unemployment benefit online, they will still call you in for the interview, so they still employ that large army of people to check your details because they don't trust you to give them accurate information (and also to keep themselves in a job).
Secondly, there comes a point where the money spent on advertising and the benefit it gives in the reduction of staff isn't worthwhile: the money could be spent on employing more people!
I suspect it's not about that, I suspect DWP is trying to use the web as a means of communication with the public. But it's ill thought out, unless they start random pop-up advertising (which would cause a public outcry and it's much more blatent what's being done), people only end up at the DWP site because they're actively searching for it.
I think it's just a case of the dumb DWP people haven't thought it through.
As them for the justification of why the £1m budget was set for this particular activity.
You'll probably find it was purely an arbitrary figure that someone conjured up out of thin air with no good rationale behind it.
A Freedom of Information Act request needs to be submitted to find out what their real strategy is and how have they measured the success of that strategy.
I'm willing to bet, there is no measurement of success criteria, that would be far too forward thinking for a civil service department, where they can just get away with wasting our money with no accountability. Even if you could point the finger at one individual, they will never be fired
These civil service organisations ( I worked in one), regularly say in team meetings, there's an acute awareness that they have to get good value for money for the tax payer..they know it's not their money to burn, but yet, there they carry on, time after time wasting out money with no accountability..
but...... Isn't there a balance to be struck between the publics desire to ensure that fraud is minimised and DWPs desire to reduce overheads. Unfortunately the DWP is a prime target for fraudsters 'cos its big, complex and hard. That's not necesarily the civil serviants fault but a consequence of an everchanging policy enviornment. You're kind of implying that DWP should trust those people who apply online and that would open things up to a whole world of fraud. . the point isn't did you get called in for a follow up - and not every one is - but how much can you save over a largish dishonest population.
you do have to ensure that the right people get the right money and that's nothingto do with justifying our own jobs but making sure that Mr and Mrs Taxpayer are protected.. We could all be out of work if HMG took the policy decision to have big bags of cash sitting in the street for the honest poor to help themselves to but I doubt that that would work.
So where's the balance.....
El Reg, bear in mind that Chris Grayling had nothing to do with the DWP in 2009/2010.
All this money was spent under the auspices of the Labour Government and we all know how expensive the Labour Propoganda Machine is!
.....and I'll say it again.
You can see the root cause of this by looking at government advertising. Sometime in the last few years, the small print strapline at the bottom changed from "Go online to <url>" to "Search online for <some words>".
Whichever complete and total dickheaded fuckwit thought up that mind-numbingly idiotic piece of sheer arsehattery ought to be made to pay for the consequences!
In the meantime, I'd love to see some bunch of merry mischief makers make a list of all the <some words> in HMGs adverts and googlebomb/rickroll/goatse the fuck out them to teach these daft pillocks a lesson they richly deserve.
