The Google Online Marketing Challenge and Research Opportunities

TLDR: The Google Online Marketing Challenge as discussed by the authors is an ongoing collaboration between Google and academia to give students experiential learning, which gives student teams US$200 in AdWords, Google's flagship advertising product, to develop online marketing campaigns for actual businesses.

Abstract: The Google Online Marketing Challenge is an ongoing collaboration between Google and academics, to give students experiential learning. The Challenge gives student teams US$200 in AdWords, Google's flagship advertising product, to develop online marketing campaigns for actual businesses. The end result is an engaging in-class exercise that provides students and professors with an exciting and pedagogically rigorous competition. Results from surveys at the end of the Challenge reveal positive appraisals from the three—students, businesses, and professors—main constituents; general agreement between students and instructors regarding learning outcomes; and a few points of difference between students and instructors. In addition to describing the Challenge and its outcomes, this article reviews the postparticipation questionnaires and subsequent datasets. The questionnaires and results are publicly available, and this article invites educators to mine the datasets, share their results, and offer suggestions for future iterations of the Challenge.

Figures

Table 1: Survey Questions Categorized across Topics

Table 2: Comparing professor and student perceptions

Figure 1: Sponsored Links Appear Above and to the Right of Organic Search Results

Figure 2: Sponsored Ads on the Content Network

Figure 3, How the Challenge Works

Full text

MURDOCH RESEARCH REPOSITORY
http://researchrepository.murdoch.edu.au/
This is the author’s preprint version of the work, as accepted for publication
following peer review but without the publisher’s layout or pagination.
Neale, L., Treiblmaier, H., Henderson, V., Hunter, L., Hudson, K. and
Murphy, J. (2009) The Google Online Marketing Challenge and research
opportunities. Journal of Marketing
Education, 31 (1). pp. 76-85.
http://researchrepository.murdoch.edu.au/4310/
Copyright © 2009 Sage Publication.
It is posted here for your personal use. No further distribution is permitted.

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[This version differs from the final JME paper such as addressing reviewer comments and formatting.]
The Google Online Marketing Challenge and Research Opportunities
Larry Neale, Lecturer, Queensland University of Technology
Horst Treiblmaier, Professor, Kazakhstan Institute of Management, Economics and Strategic Research
Vani Henderson, PhD, Quantitative Marketing Manager, Google Inc.
Lee Hunter, Product Marketing Manager, Google UK
Karen Hudson, AdWords Relationship Manager, Google Europe
Jamie Murphy, Associate Professor, The University of Western Australia Business School
Key Words: Google, Experiential Learning, Marketing Education, Online Contest, Online Marketing
Abstract
The Google Online Marketing Challenge is an ongoing collaboration between Google and academics, in
order to give students experiential learning. The Challenge gives student teams $US200 in AdWords,
Google’s flagship advertising product, to develop online marketing campaigns for actual businesses. The
end result is an engaging in-class exercise that provides students and professors with an exciting and
pedagogically rigorous competition. Results from surveys at the end of the Challenge reveal positive
appraisals from the three – students, businesses and professors – main constituents, general agreement
between students and instructors regarding learning outcomes, and a few points of difference between
students and instructors. In addition to describing the Challenge and its outcomes, this paper reviews the
post-participation questionnaires and subsequent datasets. The questionnaires and results are publicly
available, and this paper invites educators to mine the datasets, share their results and offer suggestions
for future iterations of the Challenge.
Introduction
In 2008 Google launched the Google Online Marketing Challenge (hereinafter Challenge), a global
student competition. The Challenge attracted over eight thousand students along with 339 instructors and
1619 businesses from 47 countries. In teams of four to six, the students crafted and ran three-week online
marketing campaigns for real businesses, using real advertisements that represented real money.
Furthermore, students could access near real time reports on the web-based advertisements they created.
To improve the logistical and pedagogical aspects of the Challenge, as well as spur research of online
marketing and student learning, Google distributed post-exercise questionnaires to all Challenge

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participant groups – students, professors and businesses. The survey datasets, as well as other online
marketing, teaching and learning resources are available at the Challenge Research Center
(www.google.com/onlinechallenge/research.html). Via the Challenge, Google envisions ongoing
academic collaboration to encourage research of teaching, learning and online marketing. This paper, an
early step in the partnership, describes the inaugural Challenge and Challenge datasets for academic use.
In addition, the paper investigates an overarching question. Was the Challenge a successful collaborative
teaching and learning tool for students, professors and businesses?
This study begins with a brief overview of the Challenge origins and its goal of collaboration among
businesses, students, Google and academics, particularly the last two stakeholders. This section also
briefly describes AdWords and its role in the Challenge, before reviewing the logistics of the Challenge
and the role of experiential learning in the Challenge. Next, the paper explains the development and
administration of three questionnaires for participating students, professors and businesses, and
subsequent data cleaning of their responses. After a cursory overview of key responses, the manuscript
compares and discusses business, student and professor responses. The paper closes with a few ideas for
future research using the datasets and a call for future collaboration.
Evolution of the Challenge
The Challenge began in early March 2007. A Google employee and his former professor discussed giving
students a real-world experiential online marketing exercise, which aligned with a growing shift in
university education, away from instruction and toward learning. The Learning Paradigm argues that
“students must be active discoverers and constructors of their own knowledge” (Barr & Tagg, 1995, p.
21). To help decide whether students participating in the Challenge should work individually or in groups,
among other things, the originators noted the standards set by the Association to Advance Collegiate
Schools of Business (AACSB). When accrediting business schools, the AACSB seeks evidence of
professors encouraging collaboration among students – Standard 13 – and students learning from each
other – Standard 14 (AACSB, 2008). The practitioner and academic envisioned the Challenge as a fun
and exciting competition that helped students learn experientially, working in groups with real clients and
spending real money.
The two originators, and a small team of Google employees and academics, kept these goals in mind and
developed a basic framework of student experiential learning via AdWords. Google’s flagship product,
AdWords, lets advertisers display relevant and targeted text ads above and alongside Google search
results. Google separates organic search results from ads for user distinction, labeling these as ‘Sponsored

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Links’. Figure 1 shows the results of a Google search for ‘hand delivered flowers’, with relevant
AdWords advertisements above and to the right of the search results. Advertisers design AdWords ads to
target user interests, choosing search keywords and phrases that relate to their website or products. When
a user enters the same or similar keywords into a Google search, the advertiser’s ads are eligible for
display.
Figure 1: Sponsored Links Appear Above and to the Right of Organic Search Results
In addition to search results, Google displays AdWords ads on millions of partner websites, such as the
New York Times newspaper (www.nytimes.com) and Edmunds car-buying guide (www.edmunds.com),
in over 100 countries and 20 languages. Visitors to these sites see ads related to the web page content.
Figure 2 shows relevant AdWords ads appearing on the content network, in this case a web page on
www.bobvilla.com, a website for home improvement advice.

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Figure 2: Sponsored Ads on the Content Network
Both models, displaying AdWords on search queries or partner websites, are usually a cost per click
(CPC) model; advertisers pay only when a visitor clicks on an ad. Advertisers can tweak the placement of
their ad based mainly on two factors, the ad’s relevance and the maximum CPC bid. The more relevant
the ad and the higher the CPC bid, the better the ad’s position toward the top of a list of ads. Advertisers
can set when their ads run such as during business hours or on weekdays, and where their ads run such as
in designated cities, countries or regions. The Challenge model that progressed had student groups
construct ads for businesses that they recruited.
A key decision by the small cabal of academics and Googlers was to design the Challenge as an academic
exercise and to target academics more than students or businesses. To construct a global competition, the
developers recruited 14 academics from eight countries, each with a passion for and experience in online
marketing. This Global Academic Panel (www.google.com/onlinechallenge/panel.html) helped manage
academic aspects of the Challenge such as developing materials for students, instructors and businesses,
and ultimately choosing regional and global winners.

Frequently asked questions

Q1. What are the contributions in this paper?

The end result is an engaging in-class exercise that provides students and professors with an exciting and pedagogically rigorous competition. In addition to describing the Challenge and its outcomes, this paper reviews the post-participation questionnaires and subsequent datasets. The questionnaires and results are publicly available, and this paper invites educators to mine the datasets, share their results and offer suggestions for future iterations of the Challenge. Furthermore, students could access near real time reports on the web-based advertisements they created. 

Q2. What are the future works in this paper?

The Academic Research Center section ( www. google. com/onlinechallenge/research. html ) of the Challenge website offers nine datasets available for future research. A key future research contribution of these datasets is their global scope – 42 countries for the students, 33 for the instructors and 31 SME countries. General areas of future research include cross-cultural educational experiences, advertising copywriting, online marketing, marketing education, experiential learning, action learning, international marketing, and student group work. Researchers may want to use the datasets to see which variables help predict the future intentions of students, instructors and businesses. 

Q3. What languages did instructors teach the Challenge?

Most (63%) instructors taught the Challenge class in English followed by Spanish (7%), Portuguese (6%), Hungarian (5%) and German (5%). 

Q4. What did the respondents think of the Challenge?

Instructor responses revealed that 90% believed their students were enthusiastic participants, 95% thought the ability to spend real money contributed positively to the learning experience, and 96% would run the Challenge in a future class. 

Q5. How many SMEs and students would like to participate in the Challenge?

Over three of four SMEs and students would like to participate again, compared to 96% of the professors interested in further participation. 

Q6. What was the key decision by the cabal of academics and googlers?

A key decision by the small cabal of academics and Googlers was to design the Challenge as an academic exercise and to target academics more than students or businesses. 

Q7. How many students and professors were easy to persuade to participate in the Challenge?

In the inaugural Challenge, more than 80% of students and professors found it easy to identify suitable businesses, and almost 82% found it easy to persuade them to participate. 

Q8. How many businesses would like to be involved in future student projects?

Importantly for university outreach, 80% of responding businesses indicated they would like to be involved in future student projects with their local university. 

Q9. What did the researchers find to be the effective method of reducing technical problems?

A series of pretests using members of the Academic Panel and some non-participating students helped reduce technical problems, coding errors and formatting anomalies due to browser differences. 

Q10. How many beta tests did the challenge concept have?

Three beta tests of the Challenge concept were with an undergraduate class in Australia, an undergraduate class in Singapore and a graduate class in Australia. 

Q11. How many years of teaching experience did the instructors have?

On average, instructors in the Challenge had almost 10 years of teaching experience, with more than half of responding instructors ranked Associate Professor or Professor. 

Q12. What was the purpose of the cleaning of the datasets?

Following data collection, cleaning the datasets was a multilevel process to ensure data validity, data quality, and respondent privacy. 

Q13. What is the key future research contribution of these datasets?

A key future research contribution of these datasets is their global scope – 42 countries for the students, 33 for the instructors and 31 SME countries. 

Q14. What was the process of creating the questionnaires?

The questionnaires for the three participant groups – students, SMEs and instructors – stemmed from an iterative quasi-Delphi process over six months. 

Q15. What was the next round of questionnaire development?

The next round of questionnaire development involved Googlers and the Academic Panel collaborating via email, Google Docs (docs.google.com) and both traditional and voice over Internet protocol telephony. 

Q16. What was the reason for the low response rates for students and businesses?

The low response rates for students (9%) and businesses (6%) relative to the instructors (40%) resulted in part, from implementation problems. 

Q17. What was the next step for cleaning the database?

The next step was scanning the database for excessive repetition in the same answer category to check for patterns of non-responsiveness (Johnson, 2001). 

Q18. What did the researchers find useful in the 2009 Challenge?

A cursory categorization of the open-ended responses into topics and sub-topics yielded insights and confirmed quantitative responses for revising the 2009 Challenge, such as changing the page lengths for the two written reports and permitting teams of three students. 

Q19. What did the researchers do to improve the qualitative responses?

Apart from deleting names of individuals, institutions or other possible identifying information, the qualitative responses were left as is, replete with typographical errors by all three participant groups. 

Q20. How many students and professors were impressed by the challenge?

Almost 76% perceived that competing against students globally increased student involvement and almost 92% believed the Challenge effectively illustrated the difficulties of developing a web advertising campaign that stands out from billions of others. 

Q21. How did the panelists promote the Challenge?

Once live, the panelists promoted the Challenge with colleagues and via academic listservs such as ELMAR, Trinet, ISWorld, EMMA and IFITT. 

Q22. How many students were pleased with the Challenge?

Almost 87% of the responding students agreed that the Challenge engaged them better than other teaching tools such as cases and simulations, and 92% were pleased with the overall experience.