9 August 2004

UK.Gov Enters Search Listing Stakes

By Ian Cuddy

The UK Government has launched its first ever search engine marketing campaign in a bid to drive traffic to its new Directgov citizen portal.

In its latest attempt to get more citizens using online public services, the Cabinet Office's eGovernment Unit has bid for sponsored search results on the UK's three main paid-for listing providers - Google, Overture and Espotting.

When a search query matches the keywords bought by the Government, short text adverts for Directgov are triggered and highlighted either within or alongside the search results. The aim is to get the portal featured on the first page of results, except for where competition for certain keywords makes this prohibitively expensive.

Most of the keywords trialled by the Government reflect the three key groups of citizens - parents, disabled people and motorists - that Directgov is chiefly targetting in its first few months of operation. Searching Google for "pregnancy advice", "carers", "child tax credit" or "driving test", for example, automatically brings up a link highlighting information available on the citizen portal or the DTI's BusinessLink website. To see this action, click here or here.

The paid-for placements will be listed in search results on the listing providers' advertising networks, which in Overture's case, includes high-traffic UK portals like Yahoo, AOL, Wanadoo and MSN. With the inclusion of adverts on search leader Google, the campaign's reach should extend to millions of UK internet users.

The move is understood to be the first use of pay-per-click placement to promote an online government service. It apparently lacks any precedent, even in countries like the US and Canada which boast higher take-up of eGovernment services than the UK.

The Government's test campaign will run until mid-October. The eGovernment Unit is currently measuring the cost-effectiveness of particular search terms and says that it wants to avoid competing against its existing free listings. A spokesperson for the Unit told eGov monitor Weekly: "So far the test campaign is delivering significant amounts of extra traffic to Directgov and seems to be cost effective." Latest website traffic figures for the portal indicate that the number of unique visitors rose to around 589,000 in July against a figure of 471,500 for the previous month.

Directgov's overall marketing strategy will also include search engine optimisation, distribution deals with third parties and cross-linking with other government departments' websites.

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