Filed under: International markets, Google (GOOG), Marketing and advertising, Middle East
It seems to me like the ultimate test of a tool lies not with its functionality, but with who uses it. This goes double for search tools, as their ability to access information vastly increases their popularity, and thus marketability. Personally, I firmly believe that most questions in the world can be answered by one of three sites. If it’s a movie or Television question, I head to IMDB. If IMDB doesn’t have the answer, I generally head over to Wikipedia. And if, for some reason, Wiki’s answer doesn’t suffice, I pull out the large guns and head over to Google (NASDAQ: GOOG). Of course, so does pretty much everyone else in the world.
This, of course, explains why the United Says has begun investing heavily in Google Ads in foreign countries. While the government’s on the web presence is pretty impressive, even the ideal website is only useful if it can generate hits; given the United States’ overseas unpopularity right now, getting foreign nationals to visit its sites is an uphill battle. With this in mind, Google now displays ads for various United Says government agencies when the user enters various key words and phrases. Currently, the terms that’ll generate an ad from the America.gov website include “terrorism,” “Middle East peace,” “human rights,” “press freedom,” and “U.S. elections.”
The U.S. is paying Google based on the number of hits that its ads generate. Currently, that ranges from $25,000 to $30,000 per month for the America.gov website and a further $15,000 for other Middle-East oriented sites. Given that the $15,000 expenditure generates roughly 300,000 hits per month, it seems like a pretty good deal. For that matter, it’s worth noting that an world wide web search platform has become the U.S. government’s go-to guy for worldwide advertising. If Google can get people in Saudi Arabia to express an interest in the U.S.’s informational website, it seems like there’s little that the company can’t do!
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