The Google Online Marketing Challenge
by Dr. Jamie Murphy, Professor, The University of Western Australia Business School
Lee Hunter, Google UK
Karen Hudson, Google
Challenge Overview
It is perhaps the world's largest in-class competition, with over 8,000 students in the 2008
Google Online Marketing Challenge and over 10,000 students from 57 countries in the 2009
version. The Challenge gives graduate and undergraduate students hands-on experience in the
fastest growing advertising medium. Keyword advertising is the critical revenue stream for
major search engines such as Google and Yahoo, and a major business model for the foreseeable
future. Google earned almost $22 billion in 2008, and over 95% of this revenue came from their
keyword advertising form, AdWords.
Usually in the right-hand column of Google search results, traditional AdWords have four lines
of copy and no images. The headline contains a maximum of 25 characters, and the next three
lines each contain a maximum of 35 characters. Table 1 shows two sample AdWords ads for the
American Marketing Association, with identical copy except for the third line, which should
appeal to scholars (left) or those seeking employment (right).
Table 1: Sample AdWords
American Marketing Assoc.
Top journals; great articles
Visit and join now
www.marketingpower.com
American Marketing Assoc.
Job resources and opportunities
Visit and join now
www.marketingpower.com
The Challenge, a fun and exciting competition, helps students learn experientially, working in
groups with real clients and spending real money. Google positions the Challenge as an
academic exercise with problem-based learning, facilitated by Google rather than a Google
promotion facilitated by academics. For example, students must submit two written reports in
order to compete.
The Challenge benefits universities, businesses, students and academics, but targets academics.
To that end, a panel of 15 academics in nine countries helps develop materials for students,
Marketing Academics@AMA
1
instructors, and businesses, and ultimately choose regional and global winners. The Challenge
website hosts student and instructor materials, as well as fun videos, Frequently Asked Questions
and AdWords resources. Pedagogy, particularly experiential learning and problem-based
learning, play a key role in the learning objectives.
To spur student and academic interest, Google sponsors three regional prizes and an overall prize.
The 2009 regional winning student teams, and their professors, won an overnight trip to the
Google headquarters in China, Ireland and the USA. The overall winner, and their professor,
won a week's San Francisco holiday including a day at Google's nearby global headquarters, the
Googleplex. The overall and regional wining students also won laptop computers.
Challenge Implementation
The Challenge follows the steps in Figure 1. After the instructor divides students into groups of 3
to 6 members, the groups recruit a client business. Based on their research of the business, its
market and competitors, teams develop an AdWords campaign for the business. Google provides
each team with US$200 AdWords credit to spend during a 3-week campaign. To accommodate
class schedules across 6 continents, students can run their campaign for any 3 consecutive weeks
from late January to late May.
Figure 1, How the Challenge Works
from http://www.google.com/onlinechallenge/about.html
Students spend their AdWords budget, bid for keywords, and adjust their campaigns based on
monitoring near realtime reports generated by Google AdWords. These reports include metrics
such as visitors' geographic locations, number of clicks on each ad, the number of times Google
displayed the ad on a Web page, the subsequent click-through rate for each ad, and the cost per
click for each ad. Students compete for ad placement and position with online advertisers around
the world, as well as with student groups—locally, regionally, and globally.
How students manage their US$200 budget and 3-week campaign depends on the business and
student team. For example, some businesses work with students to improve the website, whereas
other businesses want no website recommendations, or have no idea how to change the website.
Businesses often take an active interest in the campaign.
Marketing Academics@AMA
2
Selecting the Challenge winners is innovative, drawing on one quantitative and two qualitative
steps. First, a proprietary Google algorithm examines over 30 campaign factors across 5 broad
areas: account structure, optimization techniques, account activity and reporting, performance
and budget, and relevance. Google uses the algorithm to select the top 50 teams in each of 3
regions (Americas, Europe, and Asia-Pacific). Then in a qualitative step, Google AdWords
specialists trim these 150 teams to 5 teams per region, or 15 teams. Finally, in the second
qualitative step the Academic Panel chooses regional and global winners from these 15 teams
based solely on two written reports. Panellists whose teams make the final 15 abstain from all
judging.
Experiential learning drives the Challenge logistics and pedagogy, particularly the Pre-Campaign
Strategy and Post-Campaign Summary. Most instructors assess their students on these reports.
The Pre-Campaign Strategy includes a client overview and proposes an online advertising
strategy with target audience settings, keyword examples, advertising copy, and projected
success metrics. The Post- Campaign Summary incorporates an industry component with
campaign results and client recommendations, and a learning component with student reflections
on learning objectives, group dynamics, and client dynamics.
Challenge Results and Feedback
Two initiatives – conference presentations and post-participation surveys – helped improve the
2009 Challenge. A couple dozen academics presented the Challenge at 15 conferences on four
continents, as invited or refereed presentations. This academic outreach is invaluable for
understanding and improving the Challenge in the classroom, as well as improving positive
experiences for participating students, academics and businesses.
In order to gauge the Challenge's success with its four audiences – universities, academics,
students and businesses – as well as to improve the Challenge and spur research of online
marketing, teaching and learning, Google surveys these constituent groups. The questionnaires
and datasets are available from the Challenge Research Center
<http://www.google.com/onlinechallenge/research.html>. Logistically and pedagogically,
feedback from students, instructors, and businesses was overwhelmingly positive.
Over 80% of the businesses reported active and enjoyable engagement with the student teams, as
well as interest in future student projects with their local university. About 90% of the
responding students were pleased with the overall experience and rated the Challenge as more
engaging than other teaching tools such as cases and simulations. Over 90% of the instructors
believed their students were enthusiastic participants, thought the ability to spend real money
contributed positively to the learning experience, and would run the Challenge in a future class.
Anecdotal evidence and survey responses to the open-ended questions also highlighted positive
outcomes such as a competitive edge when applying for jobs and motivating students to learn
about advertising and marketing theories.
The survey results along with feedback from academics, Googlers, and the Global Academic
Panel led to dozens of minor changes in the 2009 Challenge. Three major changes were revising
Marketing Academics@AMA
3
the team size and page limits for the written reports, and collapsing the student guides from three
guides to two guides.
In Conclusion
The Google Online Marketing Challenge is a success in enrolment, industry collaboration, realworld experiences, and community engagement. It helps address key areas of marketing and
advertising and helps teach these critical topics in the classroom. In addition, The Challenge
nurtured one official and myriad unofficial learning communities. The Challenge Research
Center, mentioned earlier, provides access to journal articles, conference papers, conference
presentations and data sets focused on experiential learning.
Four fun exemplars of the unexpected, user-driven Challenge learning communities follow.
GOMCHA <http://www.gomcha.com/> is a student-developed Web 2.0 community for
Challenge academics, students and business. A delightful YouTube video by Spanish students in
the 2008 Challenge is at <http://www.youtube.com/v/xLH8nGlqlCA>. The third example, Table
2 below, is a few student blogs about the Challenge. Finally, winning students from the 2008
Challenge wrote a textbook <http://www.gomchabook.com/> for competing in the Challenge.
Written by students for students, Full Disclosure: Cracking the Google Online Marketing
Challenge includes AdWords information and, importantly for academics everywhere, solid
guidelines for working as a team and crafting written reports. These exemplars illustrate how
students developed a learning community that helps themselves, industry and academics.
Table 2: Challenge Blogs
2008
2009
Argentina http://thegoogers.blogspot.com/
Canada http://sauderadwords.blogspot.com/
Germany http://potatohomies.blogspot.com/
Spain http://kasselgroup.blogspot.com/
Italy
http://maniacsmansion.blogspot.com/ UK
http://cwlsegomc.wordpress.com/
Interested academics can pre-register here for the 2010 Challenge.
Academics interested in a free U.S. $50 voucher to test-drive Google AdWords can contact
Jamie Murphy at jmurphy@biz.uwa.edu.au.
_____________________________________________________________________________________________
Jamie Murphy (Australia), Challenge academic lead, is working with Google and the panelists
to ensure the Challenge provides a solid academic experience for the students and worthwhile
consulting for the participating businesses.
Jamie is a Professor at The University of Western Australia Business School. His hospitality
background and an MBA from Michigan State University led to European marketing manager
for PowerBar and Greg Lemond Bicycles, and both an MS and PhD from Florida State
University. His industry and academic experience spans five continents and includes hundreds
Marketing Academics@AMA
4
of publications in academic journals, international conferences and leading newspapers such as The New York Times
and Wall Street Journal. Dr. Murphy’s research focus is effective use of the Internet for citizens, businesses and
governments. His academic passion, however, is teaching and mentoring great students.
Lee Hunter is the Head of Acquisition Marketing for Google UK, looking after all advertiser
marketing in the UK and Ireland. He is also responsible for the development and launch of the
Google Online Marketing Challenge - the world's largest in-class academic competition. With a
Masters in e-Marketing, Lee's background includes marketing for tech start-ups, financial
services and consulting businesses across Australia and the UK.
Karen Hudson is an AdWords Online Sales and Operations Team Lead who is responsible for the Education and
Local industries in German speaking market. She is involved in the development of education materials and
AdWords specific aspects of the Google Online Marketing Challenge. Karen's background includes business
development and client management in auto, logistics and drinks businesses in Germany, Ireland and Luxembourg.
Marketing Academics@AMA
5