Googling for Schools: Do K-12 School Districts Purchase Adwords to Drive Website Traffic?

For decades, K-12 school districts have advertised their educational programming to prospective students, parents, and support networks. However, as the Internet technologies have advanced, educational institutions, including colleges and universities, have spent millions of dollars per year in online advertising leveraging Google’s search engine and data science marketing platforms. To date, no educational research has investigated the spending of K-12 school districts as to whether these educational entities have followed higher education’s lead and also purchase Google’s online advertising services to influence the educational marketplace and recruit students, parents, and support networks into the district. This study analyzes Google Adwords advertising and marketing data to evaluate 764 K-12 school districts in Texas to explore whether these school districts advertise online and how much they spend. Results suggest few K-12 school districts in Texas advertise, yet ones that do tend to be public charter schools with multiple campuses across the state. Implications for 21^st century data science resources and K-12 web metrics are addressed, in addition to policy and practice scenarios.