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back to article UK.gov drops £6m on Google

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 …

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  1. lglethal Silver badge
    Thumb Down

    Those numbers do seem ridiculously high...

    Is there anyone out there with experience of google ads for a major company and the amount they spend on advertisements in this medium?

    It would be nice to have a relative figure to compare with rather then just following the Daily Fail route of "Oh no! Look how much money those Labour bastards gave to evil Google!"

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  2. oddjobz
    Alert

    So if they have all this money ...

    How come it take them so long to pay their bills? Making us poor contractors wait 6 months to get paid grates a little when we see things like this posted ...

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  3. Anonymous Coward
    WTF?

    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

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  4. Anonymous Coward
    FAIL

    Ok...

    ...let see the web controls for .gov justify this!

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  5. Jolyon Ralph

    Ok, I know i'm begging for thumbs downs here but here goes...

    Am I the only one who doesn't see a big problem here?

    Is this any different to the endless television adverts they put out? They spend a fortune on TV adverts, £2 million on one advert alone, at least with pay-per-click they are actually spending their money on targetted advertising.

    Of course, I'd be curious to know how many of these phrases they are paying for are phrases where their sites are already top of the organic listings.

    Jolyon

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    1. peter_dtm
      Reply Icon
      Stop

      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

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  6. Simon Thomas
    Stop

    Blanket Govenrement PPC ban required

    If the search engines are doing their jobs properly then official pronouncements on such matters should rank organically anyway. To spend our money without sufficient oversight of the competence of those racking up the bills is unacceptable. Note to the coalition - ban ALL Government spending on ALL PPC- NOW!

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  7. Anonymous Coward
    WTF?

    What on earth?

    "organic listings"? "rank organically"?

    Methinks some people are talking organic crap, what's wrong with plain English?

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  8. Azimuth
    FAIL

    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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