How my students got a top spot in the 2011 Google Online Marketing Challenge
2011
I’m happy that the top team was composed of the students who got the highest grades in my class. This indicates that our learning activities and measures were truly geared toward the skillsets needed for Internet marketing (or at least advertising). These I think are those skillsets:
- Darwinian marketing (vs creationist) — in the web, it is more about evolving toward a stronger and stronger marketing system rather than a genius big bang of a campaign. This means a lot of testing, measurement and optimization — in the targeting, the ad copy and the landing pages.
- The advertising platform — with great targeting comes great complexity, to paraphrase Spidey. Google Adwords is extremely powerful and consequently…. see the ugly infographic I made.
- Business writing — just like in the real world, you have to be awesome both in fact in and appearance. The top team not only crafted and optimized their campaign really well — they told the best story among my students.
Since I’m blogging as a teacher and not as a businessman, let me share what I think is the secret sauce of the good performance of my students:
- Dry run everything — the students should experience each activity needed for the competition prior to the competition. For instance, the wonderful people of Multiply.com gave us some credits for their advertising platform (thanks again!). This gave the students the experience of writing effective web ads and measuring them. This also gave them an objective baseline for their target metrics in Adwords.
- Quality Assurance — perhaps due to my IT service delivery background, #1 and #2 simply made sense. The students had to do QA for each other’s work, and I graded them based on my QA on their work. I had to make QA checklists. I discovered that these are called “evaluation tools” in the academic world.
- Coaching — I think most of the learning happened when I sat with each team and grilled them (nicely) with questions like these: What is the business all about? What is its sales and marketing cycle? How will the web function in that cycle? How will you define a conversion? Who are your customers? How does that translate into an Adwords account structure? Really? Why? How? Could you say that in a simpler way? Do you have data to back that?
The most important factor, however, are the students. I taught the top students who qualified for the master’s degree program. I don’t think the results would have been the same with students of lesser dedication and years of training.
The teacher also has to work hard. When I began teaching this, I thought I could just wade through with my few of years of dabbling with Adwords for a couple of family businesses. As I taught it, I realized I had to deep dive in order to be an effective coach. My head is still ringing from cramming more than 60 episodes of David Zsetela’s PPC Rockstars podcast. I had to quickly devour Brad Geddes’ book, Advanced Google Adwords. And I forced myself to study by taking the Google Adwords Certification exam (I passed, yehey!).
The work was worth it. I have a 3rd party (no less than Google) saying that my students learned what they were supposed to learn. My students seemed to enjoy while learning (I also enjoyed teaching it). And I got my self not a few 1-ups for my nascent consulting gig. I’m looking forward to GOMC 2012!
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I think this is the nearest I could get to an Oscar Award speech, so I would like to take this moment to thank the people who made this course happen: Thanks to Dr. Stan Padojinog and Vince Cruz for letting me teach. Thanks to David Rogers for reaching out across the Pacific. Thanks to Maia Nuguid, Marc Macalua and the rest of the US Autoparts Web Marketing team for guesting in version 1.0 of this class. And thanks to Aileen Apolo of Google for being passionate about helping universities. Salamat!
