The Google Online Marketing Challenge and Research Opportunities

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