Kent.gov.uk – local government incompetence in PPC

‘Austerity’ is a much more familiar word nowadays and the public sector is embarking on a series of cutbacks to help towards saving the £Billions needed.  A few months back I had reason to type ‘things to do in Kent’ and saw a PPC advert that enticed me in …. to a dead page on the www.kent.gov.uk website.     At the time I was annoyed that public money was being used to fund a PPC advert that led to a dead page.

And then I forgot all about it.  Until now, having seen something in the news about cutbacks being too severe and people losing their jobs in council departments.

So I used the tools at my disposal to research what PPC adverts have been used by Kent County Council in the past 12 months.  

The good news is that they’ve stopped using PPC advertising (at least for now).   But what about how they were handling it beforehand?  Has there been wastage on PPC that was unnecessary?   Yes, there certainly has been.

For example, there was a whole campaign focusing on attracting in people who had typed certain phrases into Google.  As an example, if someone typed the phrase ‘management jobs in Dubai’ they would have seen an advert that displayed as:

Environment Graduate Jobs
At Kent County Council
Environment Stream – £23,054

If you’d typed ‘financial services authority jobs’ or numerous other types of phrases (I have them all for anyone interested) then you would have seen the same advert appear.

OK, someone thought they’d be clever by picking up on phrases that people type and then trying to tempt them into clicking on an advert, hoping that they’d be swayed into considering a type of job that was nothing to do with what they’d searched for.   What they demonstrated was a clear lack of knowledge about how PPC actually works, and they would have been penalised for that (by Google).

So what about when someone typed ‘Los Angeles things to do’, ‘where to go Paris’, ‘what do do Miami’ and ‘things to do Hong Kong’?   What do you think appeared in Google?   Try this:

What To Do Fun Day
Free Family Fun Day
Next Saturday In Canterbury

Why on earth would someone interested in Los Angeles or other places be interested in a family fun day in Canterbury?  What possessed the monkey that created that PPC campaign?!

There are numerous such examples I could come up with.  For example, Google searches on ‘Bouncy Castle’ and ‘facepaint’ brought up the Canterbury fun day advert and a search on ‘pyrenees walking holidays’ brought up an advert promoting a walking festival. 

I think that underneath the incompetence there was someone who had the best intentions – attract people to get involved at a local level, having searched for something very vaguely related, or to encourage graduates looking for numerous types of work to instead consider an Environment Graduate job.   But I wonder how well it was all measured?   What did the cost of clicks actually achieve?    And how many people clicked on adverts after the landing pages had disappeared?

The point of all this is to demonstrate that it’s easily possible to identify the PPC and SEO keywords that any organisation is visible under and while such research is generally used by those in business to identify what competitors are doing (ask me how, if wanting to know more), it can also highlight significant weaknesses.

The big question in my mind is this:

“Out of thousands of staff, plus the presence of numerous PPC experts within Kent, how was it possible to make such a mess of something that could have achieved much better results at minimal cost to the public purse?”

So yes, I do feel sorry for some of those who will lose their jobs in the public sector as time goes on but I do have to wonder whether incompetences like the one shown here are replicated in numerous other ways that lead to wastage and ultimately, to job losses when the belts have to be tightened because there’s no money left.   Finally, for an added laugh, look at the strapline on the council website … ‘A council that performs excellently’.

Article by Andy Harris at Custwin   http://tinyurl.com/2vh5572

The Real Scale of the Debt

It's a start

By January 2011 every council will have to publish details of invoices over £500.

Kent County Council have started by publishing details of invoices over £500 that have been paid by their Environment, Highways and Waste services.  In the months ahead they plan to publish all expenditure over £500.

They  will be publishing the data each month in two formats - Microsoft Excel and Adobe PDF to make the data as useful as possible to as many people as possible.

Making sense of the invoice information

This is what the data looks like:

The files contain details of all invoices paid in the reporting month that have a value of £500 or more (excluding VAT). We will not be publishing details of payments that are of a personal nature, such as those to foster carers.

The data is split into six columns containing:

• the reference number for the payment being made
• the name of the supplier/organisation receiving the payment
• the date the payment was processed by our payments system
• the value of the payment on the invoice in pounds excluding VAT
• the part of the council (we call them directorates) that made the payment
• the cost type which shows how we categorise the payment (we use more than 700 different cost types to help us identify and manage our spending).

For accounting purposes, the council is organised into five areas:

• Adult Social Services
• Chief Executive's Department
• Children, Families and Education
• Communities
• Environment, Highways and Waste

Invoice details

Details of the invoices they  pay are available  in two formats - Microsoft Excel and Adobe PDF.

Full details here http://kent.gov.uk/your_council/council_spending/invoices_over_500_pounds.aspx