DoH splurges £2.72m on Adwords

As publicly funded service.

It shouldn't be spending a penny on advertising.

No doubt, those responsible thought they were being "cool" by doign this.

Well spent

not an ounce of common sense left in da House.

SEO = £2,720,457.11 per annum for just one UK Go Vermin department !

And just how many departments are there ?

Talk about a spending spree in the middle of a recession.

We at least, can take a good guess at which IT specialists were not employed on this project. Good old cut backs.

F*ck me, if they had a Google account they could have got just as good a service (if not better) for nuffin'. But then, they aren't in the business of knowing stuff, are they ?

All they needed was to stick Google Checkout on their pages and they could earn free AddWords everytime some numchaka uses the Google cart !

ALF

They'd only meant to spend 20k

but Adwords stepped in and found all sorts of ways to advertise.

I've just ripped all the Google code out of my one site that ran adverts. It's spent the last few days advertising pillows and diet pills, FFS. On a motorsports web site.

Proportionate?

Quote: "The Department for Work and Pensions said such information could only be provided at disproportionate cost."

I wonder if the cost of supplying information is as 'disproportionate ' as the £2.72m their sister* department spent with Google? And I wonder how effectively that 'combination of robust techniques' establishes the actual real life benefits of that spend?

I'm not sure if rank-chasing and SEO is what I want the Dept of Health to spend my tax on. I think, on balance, I'd prefer it to go to doctors and nurses. Well, nurses anyway ...

* 'Sister' because the two departments used to be united in the former Dept of Health and Social Security (DHSS).

What!!!!

Why are they wasting OUR tax money on advertising on the internet?

I think the people responsible should have to pay this out of their own pocket!

Timely action?

"The department... estimates that 10,000 more people have got early access to care as a result of its Act FAST campaign"

"Oh noes, face has fallen on one side... Must get on Google and search for "stroke" to see what to do next... oops, safe search is off..."

WTF ?

and to echo the prevailing sentiment - wouldn't this have been better spent actually on the Health Service provision (do the Daily Mail know ?)

Unbelievable

It is about time this government who must take responsibility, stopped accepting lobbying 'bribes' and started employing honest IT Specialists who make IT choices which are decided on fact and not fantasy or back of the pocket banquets on yachts.

Two words to describe a lot of this governments ministers.

Corrupt Incompetents.

Adwords v SEO

I have just searched google on 'stop smoking help' - without the quotes.

Top ad spot goes to

NHS Go Smokefree

www.smokefree.nhs.uk Vist NHS Smokefree & order your free NHS Smokefree Quit Kit today.

Top SERPs positions go to

Stop Smoking - Advice to help you quit smoking - SmokeFree

Free stop smoking support and advice from the NHS as well as videos from real quitters about their experiences and what helped them quit smoking.

smokefree.nhs.uk/ - Cached - Similar

NHS Stop Smoking Help and Support - Options - SmokeFree

Learn about local NHS stop smoking services, how to get support at home, ...

smokefree.nhs.uk/what-suits-me/

Stop smoking start living - Online materials

Help Somebody Else You Care About To Stop Smoking ...

smokefree.nhs.uk/quit-tools/order-support-materials/

More results from smokefree.nhs.uk »

The more results then provides 944 additional pages all ranking on the phrase 'stop smoking help'

Now, here are the questions?

Who (other than an idiot) pays for ads when they have the top 3 positions in the SERPs - plus another 900 pages waiting in the wings in case one of those pages stops ranking?

Anyone fancy putting in a FoI request for how much is has cost to produce those 900 pages all about 'stop smoking'?

If it was £2m on the adverts then it must have been £20m on the pages - and that is only one search term.

Just checked the SERPs for google.com with no country data (other than the corruption which Google thinks I need because of IP address) and the NHS site comes out on top of smokefree.gov at #4.

It would not be too difficult to spend a lot of money on fonts. The question has to be, Why? There is no point whatsoever in producing a website with specific fonts if I don't have those fonts available to my browser. And, if I have set Tahoma as by default font it does not matter what font the NHS want me to see, I am still going to get everything in the font I want to see. Interesting style sheet, standard fonts for most PCs:

h1 { font-family: Trebuchet MS, Helvetica, sans-serif;

Other things in the style sheet are much more interesting:

iframe { position: absolute; left: -9999px; }

Makes me wonder what they are hiding in addition to the google profiling scripts that they host on every page. No way I would ever interact with that website, not even if they have spent my taxes for the benefit of the shareholders of a data mining company.

A quick look at the browser logs reveal that the only reason the NHS is spending money with Google is so that my visit can be passed over to other data mining companies: doubleclick, adviva, readingroom, cetrk - more (sub)domains to add to my hosts file.

That website is enough to make me SICK.

With behaviour like this from the overlords it makes me wonder why our doctors and nursing staff are not leaving the country to find jobs where money is spent on healthcare and their wages rather than gifting the profiles of citizens to greedy data miners.

Has the NHS received one penny for even one of the profiles it has so ignorantly given away?