Outdoor advertising can be an expensive medium to use to promote an exhibition, especially if you are located in a big city like London, and a conversation about this earlier this week made me think of Google Adwords as a medium for museums to advertise through.
I went to Google and did a search for ‘museum London’, and this brought up search results, but no adverts. I repeated this with ‘exhibition London’, ‘Days out London’, ‘Museum New York’, ‘Exhibition New York’, ‘Days out New York’ and none of these searches resulted with adverts for museums or galleries.
This made me wonder if Google Adwords, popular with businesses has any museums advertising on it?
Adwords lets you create adverts and pay only when people click through to your website from them, this would seem an attractive proposition for a museum on a tight budget, especially when you consider that a large proportion of museum visitors use Google as a pre-visitor tool when thinking about making a visit.
I guess my question is, do you use Google Adwords? Do you think Google Adwords could be used as an effectively by a museum or gallery?
The Arab American National Museum has been using Google AdWords for close to two years. We were fortunate to be the recipient of a Google grant that allowed us to partner with a local university to develop our online AdWords campaign. We have seen the biggest return on facility rentals and at the museum store. You can read more about the installation of our campaign here: http://bit.ly/d8TKA6
We tried Google Adwords for a few exhibitions and we weren’t impressed, it is low cost, but also low impact.
I remember when I was a museum website manager I was asked by one of my colleagues to implement adwords in order to promote one of her manifestation and boost index.
Tried to, and called google (2 years ago).
Actually… we failed. Google pricing system was totally unadapted to a public institution (at least a french one), and, besides, quite diffficult to understand ! It was impossible for instance to ask my management for a budget with no visibility on the time span of the campain, the final number of clics or even the ROI…
We’ve been experimenting with it since December for York Castle Museum – seems to be good value for money at the moment.
e.g. in the last 7 days our ads have appeared 63,000 times with 320 click-throughs, total cost £42.
Mike, we can set up you Google Analytics to tell you where the people who are coming from the advert are going on your website too, so then you’ll know that they aren’t just clicking the advert and then not going any further then your homepage.
great – can you you set that up?
ta
Mike
Thanks for creating FollowAMuseum Day on Twitter!
Devon mentioned receiving a Google Grant above and I just wanted to reinforce the incredible benefit that this can bring to a nonprofit. When I was executive director of the American Sail Training Association (http://sailtraining.org) we received approx. $50k of free AdWords advertising in the first year (2005) using key words like tall ships, sail training and maritime heritage which were directly linked to our mission.
Today I advise all of my nonprofit clients to apply for a Google Grant because the process is so quick and easy and the success rate is very high. In addition to free Google AdWords, a nonprofit gets to use Google Checkout free of any transaction fees and while there might be more elegant solutions available, retaining every penny of an online donation is tough to beat in this economy.
Of course, my experience, as is Devon’s, is in the US so it might not apply in other countries.
There are lots and lots of amazing cheap and free resources available to nonprofit organizations in the US, so expense really can’t be an excuse for not taking advantage of technology to communicate with and engage audiences.
Fair Winds,
Peter A. Mello
Sea-Fever Consulting LLC / seaz media
http://seaz.me
@petermello
Our museum has also been using Google Adwords for close to two years thanks to a grant. We’ve had the most success with advertising our Museum’s online shop and our online interactive games. About 10% of our web traffic every month comes through the ads. It does take some time to set up the system so it works at full capacity, but we had volunteer interns do this and it was a great help. Once it’s set up, it doesn’t need that much management.