Google Online Marketing Challenge—the Game I Experienced

In early July 2008, I received an email from Lee Hunter, Google's product marketing manager:

I am very, very happy to inform you that your team finished as a Regional Finalist for the Asia Pacific region! This is a fantastic achievement and places you in the top teams from some very tough competition…………As Regional Finalists, your team and your professor are invited to join the Regional Winners in a day-trip to the Google office in Sydney. Google will pay for any flights and accommodation

This means that in the Google Online Marketing Challenge competition, my team placed in the top 3 of Asia (& top 10 of the world). We had finally been rewarded after several months of competition.

About the Competition

Google Online Marketing Challenge is a competition that is combined with a university’s curriculum. First, the groups had to find a small-to-medium business that had fewer than 100 employees. Then each team uses Google’s AdWord system to set up a series of keyword ads, which are broadcast on the internet for three weeks to attract customers. Before setting up an advertisement, each team is required to write a pre-campaign strategy to evaluate the effect of the advertisement. Then each team needs to write a post-campaign strategy to analyze the popularity and traffic of the keyword ads. For running the campaign, Google sets up an AdWord account of U.S.$200 each to every participating team.


Google Online Marketing Challenge is different from many contests such as L’Oreal’s Brandstorm2009 and EStrat, which separates the contest into many stages. Google Online Marketing Challenge starts their judging process after all the teams have submitted their final reports. Any errors in the report will greatly lower a team’s chance to place high in the ranks. Therefore, the pre-campaign strategy, the campaign process, and post-campaign strategy should be as accurate as possible.

The Adjustment: Content Network

The ads click-through rates (the number of clicks per exhibition on the internet) and number of clicks on the ad is usually positively correlated. However, it should be based on the fact that the keywords and ads broadcast platform is never changed. For my team, this usage of content network is a good example of the adjustment.

Content network is a system that places advertisements on websites that are relevant to the product being sold. The content network makes a deeper impression on the viewer but has a lower traffic rate compared to the search network. In addition, the websites Google had chosen were irrelevant to the ads, thus we doubted that the visitors would be interested in the store. So my team did not use the content network to display our advertisement.

After we posted our advertisement, we noticed that even though the click-through rates of my team’s ad performed well, the number of visitors to the site was not substantial enough due to the lack of exposure. Therefore, my team started to use the content network after this discovery. Although traffic had greatly decreased, popularity of the ad had increased as my team’s ad had been more exposed. Throughout the broadcast period, content network supplied over half of the traffic. When the competition ended, we learned from judges that traffic was a very important factor in order to be selected in the competition.

Improvements

There were many things that could have been improved. For example, the store we were working did not release sales data. However, some teams were able to analyze the relationship between views and sales because the stores they were working with did release this information. If future contestants are interested in this competition, I hope that the experience reflected here could be used as a reference for them.

Finally, I would like to thank Professor Chun-Yao Huang for providing my team and me the opportunity to participate in this competition. In addition, I truly appreciate my team members and their hard work. Without their support I would not have been able to achieve this award. My appreciation and admiration for my team members is what kept me going.