When the results came in, marketing professor Theresa Flaherty screamed. All five student teams from JMU had placed in the top 10 percent in the worldwide Google Online Marketing Challenge.
Then she screamed even louder. They were up against more than 1,600 other student teams from 47 countries throughout the world. The teams included undergraduate and graduate students, and one team consisting of five JMU students placed in the top 10 in the Challenge.
Between February and May, the teams had three weeks to develop a Google AdWords campaign for a local business that was not currently using the Web site to advertise. AdWords are advertisements that pop up next to the search results when you use certain key words.
“Developed by professors in collaboration with Google, the Challenge is a great opportunity for students to gain practical, real-world, online marketing experience,” The Google Online Marketing Challenge Web site states.
The team consisted of 2008 graduates Ryan Farrell, Bethany Kent, Julia Marchetti, Katie McGinnis and Renee Montmeny chose to campaign for L’Avenir Skin Care.
“The reason for choosing L’Avenir Skin Care was a no-brainer,” Farrell said. “Mike Marenick [the owner] had never utilized Google AdWords before, which was one of the prerequisites, on top of the fact that our team felt that the skin care industry had more than enough potential to generate the click-through rate (CTR) we were looking for.”
Each team was given $200 to spend on Google AdWords, where they created ads and chose key words related to the business they were campaigning. After choosing the key words, each team specifies the maximum amount they are willing to pay each time someone clicks on the ad.
The advertisers are charged only if someone clicks on the ad, not when the ad is displayed.
The teams are then judged based on the effectiveness of the campaign and the quality of their reports. The judges consisted of professors and other business leaders from around the world, including Flaherty.
“When me and another one of my colleagues The key is choosing the right key words to use. This was challenging because there are many skin care products and companies, and therefore there was a lot of competition against us,” said Montmeny, the team captain. “We had to think of key words from many angles, for example our key words reflected not only specific skin problems, but also symptoms, cures, types of products, and more.”
Flaherty heard about the Challenge through an academic discussion group called ELMAR (Electronic Marketing), a virtual community of marketing professors from all around the world. So she had the students in her Strategic Internet Marketing class participate as part of a class project. After hearing that the competition would include graduate-level students, Flaherty said that she would be happy if the teams finished in the top 50 percent.
“So when I found out that all five teams ended up in the top 10 percent, I was elated,” Flaherty said. “I was so excited because my students worked so hard and they exceeded my expectations. This was the first competition of this kind. And to my knowledge, it is probably the largest marketing competition in the world.”
Unlike many competitions that are scenario-created-based, this one had the students actually advertise for local companies. It wasn’t a mock competition, but was what a real-world job would be like.
“So many businesses are using the Internet more than anything these days,” Montmeny said. “This experience taught me more than basic online marketing terms, but showed me how to implement strategies in a real life situation and to alter actions accordingly.”
This year was the first time Google hosted this competition.
“The next one is scheduled to run again in the spring of 2009 so I hope to do it again,” Flaherty said. “Unlike most student competitions that follow a simulation or hypothetical scenario, students gain experience by working with actual businesses in real-time with a defined budget.”
But as of now these five graduate students and Flaherty are anticipating an all-expense paid trip in September to the Google Headquarters to meet the people in the Google company that created Google AdWords in Mountain View, Cali.
