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BBCi cashes in on Hutton keywords

Posted: 04/02/04 By: Jemima Kiss
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One positive outcome for the BBC in the wake of the Hutton Inquiry may have been increased traffic to its web site, following an experiment with sponsored links on the site of search engine Google.

For a two-week period ending just before the report was released, anyone searching for 'Hutton inquiry' or 'Hutton report' on Google would have been fed a prominent link to the BBC web site, which has a section dedicated to the inquiry.

According to a BBC spokesperson, the campaign was decided back in November, before the outcome of the report could have been anticipated.

The BBC said that paid-for searches are common within the web industry, and are a low-cost method of attracting new users.

"We hope that it will attract more users to the 8.4 million that already visit the site each month.," a spokesperson said.

"The pilot covers news and sport terms and Hutton is just one topical term. The link takes users to our in-depth section, which gives an impartial and detailed account of the story."

Google charges a minimum of 4 pence per click-through for standard AdWords deals, so a two-week trial that attracted 50,000 clicks is likely to have cost the BBC at least £2,000.

A BBCi spokesperson told dotJournalism that the corporation would not be releasing the results of the AdWords trial.

"Because it's a pilot, we won’t be releasing the results. That’s a business issue," she said.

The BBC would also not comment on any increase in web traffic to BBC Online during the fallout from the Hutton inquiry.

"We don't issue figures for individual weeks, but we will issue monthly figures for web traffic at the end of the month, as usual."

• dotJournalism spotted a discreet hack on the Hutton Inquiry web site back in August 2003. Instead of reading 'Hutton Inquiry Web Site', the page label read 'A Cover up'. On the afternoon of the 27 August, the site returned to normal and when questioned later by the Telegraph, the inquiry web team denied that the site had been hacked.

See also:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/in_depth/uk/2003/david_kelly_inquiry
https://adwords.google.co.uk/select/?hl=en
http://media.guardian.co.uk/broadcast/story/0,7493,1130053,00.html