Have you checked the rates to buy some pay-per-click ads lately? You know, the kind of sponsored results that pop up at the top of the page when somebody types the name of your university or college in Google’s and Yahoo’s search boxes.
According to “Colleges Challenge Web-Advertising Practices of For-Profit Institutions,” an article published this morning in The Chronicle of Higher Education, these ads have become more and more expensive thanks to a well-known for-profit university that knows how to recruit online, and someone has decided to publicize this issue:
Richard Oliver, director of online education at Tiffin University, confronted Laura Palmer Noone, president of the University of Phoenix, after a speech she gave at a higher-education conference in Boston
[…]
The sponsored links are bought through a bidding process. The company that pays the most gets the top ad. For the “Tiffin University” search, the top spot in the results sold for more than $8 for each person who clicked on the advertising link. That could mean thousands of dollars, depending on how many people clicked.
Tiffin cannot afford to pay that much for Web ads, Mr. Oliver said. But large companies can — and do.
“It’s Goliath coming after David,” Mr. Oliver said. “If nothing else, there should be some, what am I trying to say, professional-courtesy issues.”
Dan Carnavale also reports in his article that, “Phoenix officials say they have a policy against buying Web ads linked to the names of other colleges. But sometimes the advertising vendors they hire do so without their permission, university officials said. An official of one of Phoenix’s vendors said it buys ads based on city names and will remove the ads if anyone complains. Other vendors that appear to buy such sponsored links on search engines would not comment.”
So, how do you fight back? Just follow these simple steps:
- Check Yahoo or Google to find out if any of these big “companies” ads are displayed in the sponsored results when searching for the exact match – i.e. in quotes – of your institution name.
- In some states (The Chronicle’s journalist mentions New Jersey), this practice – i.e. buying ads that are displayed when another organization’s name is used as a keyword – is against the law. Find out what’s the law in your state.
- If you find an ad using your institution name for the well-known for-profit, just let them know that one of their vendors isn’t in compliance with their own policy. According to their president, this should be enough to have the ads pulled out.
I’ve used Google ads to promote some specific programs and got interesting results. If you have any success stories on this, please email me at karine@collegewebeditor.com or post a comment below.