Comments on: Google Adwords for a Museum

By: Kate

Kate — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 17:22:19 +0000

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.

By: Peter A. Mello

Peter A. Mello — Sun, 31 Jan 2010 18:52:33 +0000

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

By: Mike

Mike — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 15:50:52 +0000

great – can you you set that up?
ta
Mike

By: Jim

Jim — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 13:46:01 +0000

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.

By: Mike

Mike — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 13:43:28 +0000

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.

By: thomas d.

thomas d. — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 11:32:59 +0000

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…

By: Ben

Ben — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 09:54:19 +0000

We tried Google Adwords for a few exhibitions and we weren’t impressed, it is low cost, but also low impact.

By: Devon Akmon

Devon Akmon — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 02:42:24 +0000

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