Vega wins SA leg of Google challenge

The Google Online Marketing Challenge is a hands-on exercise which gives undergraduate and post-graduate students direct experience of online advertising as part of their course.

Said Lee Hunter, product marketing manager for Google EMEA, “Following demand from professors and students across the world we joined forces to develop this global competition to give students a practical taste of online marketing whilst they were studying.

“We set a target of 200 participating classes worldwide and we are delighted that around 8500 students in 1650 different teams across 47 countries participated. Most of the teams successfully implemented a successful online marketing campaign, proving how affordable and user-friendly Google's online marketing can be. The fact that the majority of these teams were able to improve the online presence of a local, small business in just three weeks, suggests how powerful a tool online marketing can be for small- and medium-sized businesses across the world.”

Google AdWords advertising

Student teams received the equivalent of US$200 to spend on Google AdWords advertising in working with a local business to devise an effective online marketing campaign. They are required to outline a strategy, run the campaign, assess their results and provide the business with recommendations to further develop their online marketing.

The Vega student team chose to represent Comet Online Car Rental (www.cometcar.co.za) for its project and over the three weeks of the competition its online marketing spend, of only US$190, led to over half a million search impressions on Google, which generated a total of 358 leads to the business.

Dr Carla Enslin, academic head and Cape Town campus navigator for Vega, said, “The Google competition presented a Vega 'wisdom with magic' encounter - working with real brand challenges, real budget, real time and real space. The Google competition is a fresh win-win approach to experiential learning. We are very proud of the students' achievement and applaud the insight and experience that all teams have gained.”

All student teams were given three weeks to mastermind the strategy before submitting a campaign report to an international panel of professors. A special Google algorithm ranked the top 150 participating teams from across the world based on the success of the campaigns in raising the local business' clicks, conversions and website activity. These teams made up the semi-finalists. The top 10 teams with that ‘little bit extra' were then judged by the panel of professors to decide the challenge winners.

Winners

The following university teams won the competition:

• The overall winners were the team from the University of Western Australia, working with a rock climbing provider called "The Hangout", in Perth, Australia - www.thehangout.com.au
  
• The winners from the Americas were the team from Pennsylvania State University, working with a tourism website - www.happyvalley.com
  
• The EMEA winners were from the Universitat Bern in Switzerland, and worked with a travel agency, and the website was www.aaretal-reisen.ch
  
• The APAC winners were from the Australian Graduate School of Management, and worked with a bakery in California, www.fortheloveofsugar.com

The challenge worked like this:

1. Professors divided students into groups, who then received free online advertising vouchers for Google AdWords worth the equivalent of US$200 (around €135).
   
2. The groups or professors recruited a small-to-medium business, under 100 employees, who have a website but don't currently use AdWords. Each group worked with the business to set up an account and structure an online marketing campaign.
   
3. During a three-week competition window, the groups optimised and refined their campaigns. They had to submit two competition reports - one before they began and one after the campaign ended. Entries were judged and winners chosen based on the success of their campaigns and the quality of their reports.
   
4. To accommodate students all over the globe, students were able to compete over any three consecutive weeks between 10 February and 24 May 2008.
   

More details can be found at www.google.com/onlinechallenge/index.html.

The competition will be repeated next year.