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?