Google Online Marketing Challenge

For the 2nd year in a row, Google has sponsored a global Online Marketing Challenge. Entrants from colleges and universities from around the world created online marketing programs aimed at helping small businesses grow and prosper.

Each of the participants received the equivalent of $200 USD worth of Google AdWords advertising and three weeks to develop the small business online marketing strategy before submitting to judges for evaluation. Over 2,100 teams took part in this year’s competition.

The grand prize winners, from Deakin University in Australia, were each awarded a trip to Mountain View, California for a tour of the Googleplex, and each will also receive an Apple MacBook Pro. Not bad, huh?!

Read more about the 2009 Google Online Marketing Challenge and the winners.

Google-Microsoft-Yahoo… put all the politics and maneuvering aside and we can evaluate the program at its core. Is the program self-serving? Sure. But, I was impressed that the ‘strategies’ were judged – not just the interesting and creative uses of Google products.

All-to-often I see recently college grads enter the workforce without a clue as to what marketing means or how it works. All of the courses and ‘finals’ and papers and presentations in a typical bachelors degree program aren’t preparation enough to enable kids to hit the ground running. The leap from the Google competition to college graduates with marketing degrees is necessary in this context:

There is an entire generation of kids in highschool and college that understand Google AdWords Editor, Yahoo Search Marketing (to a lesser degree), and they’re certainly social media mavens; however, most don’t know marketing from advertising. If these students and graduates are to enter the workforce and assume their place in marketing departments and advertising agencies, then they should be more capable than they are after 4-years of college education.

I appreciate the Google Online Marketing Challenge for what it teaches – critical and strategic thinking in a marketing application. Its one thing to know the difference between objectives, strategies and tactics; it’s quite another to know how to develop each according to the problem at-hand. I believe that more competitions like this, possibly with other corporate sponsors, would further drive the point home that colleges and universities need to offer more courses that provide practical marketing discipline to help their graduates seamlessly enter the workplace.

PS – Three teams from Penn State were ‘Semi-Finalists’ in the Final-15 judging round. Congrats to Professor Jim Jansen and his students.

How do You Measure PPC Campaign Success?

When faced with this question, some online marketers might tout their AdWords figures such as impressions, clicks, click-thru-rate or cost-per-click. Others might build on that answer by offering that visits from paid search to leads and to conversions. Those online marketers with e-commerce operations would of course point to SALES.

Now obviously, none of these answers is incorrect. However, these are merely responses to the question asked. While I dread the “it depends” response to a rather benign question, the answer has as much to do with the objectives of the campaign as to the financial metrics we might use to gauge the results.

Now, consider the business objectives that you aim to achieve. Those true business objectives don’t include CTR or CPC as key performance indicators KPI’s. Click-rate and costs are factors we can manage to increase our marketing effectiveness.

Leads (conversions) and sales are indeed key performance indicators. However, I’d like to point out there are other measures that may be important to helping you achieve your objectives.

Recall business goals and strategies. Your organization may strive to

·         Create awareness for a new product or service

·         Differentiate your products by communicating features/advantages/benefits

·         Encourage trial of your products or test them out (test drive or purchase samples, for instance)

·         Drive  sales

So, if your business objectives include awareness, interest and preference, desire, trial and sales, then why are we measuring PPC search (marketing) campaign success by click-through rate (CTR), cost-per-click (CPC), leads, and sales?

In our experience, CTR and CPC metrics are just the surface of the true value of a well-managed search marketing program. We’ve been able to demonstrate that search marketing can be and should be measured by any and all of the following.

·         Un-branded vs branded impressions

·         Unique visits

·         Time on site / depth of visit

·         Downloads

·         Task completion

·         Opt-in

·         Contacts (phone/web form)

·         Quote request

·         Purchases/Sales

If marketing objectives include expanded reach or deeper visitor engagement, then the addition of the above metrics will help you better understand the total impact your paid search campaigns are having on your business.

To test this out, go into your web analytics application, Google Analytics or Omniture’s SiteCatalyst or other, and set up two reporting segments to compare the above metrics for (1) visits from paid search and (2) all other visits. What sort of trends and patterns do you notice? How do these segments compare?

If someone questions the value of the paid search marketing program in your company, then the additional metrics above should help build that value story for you.

So, how WILL you measure your pay-per-click search campaigns from now on?