FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. – An international marketing competition with more than 1,500 teams is giving students real-life experiences as they work together for businesses.

Molly Jensen, a University of Arkansas visiting assistant professor of marketing and logistics, chose the Google Online Marketing Challenge as a project for her Managerial Master of Business Administration class, which meets once a month in Fayetteville. The class is composed of working professionals who live throughout the United States.

“With the economic times we are in, the University of Arkansas needs to help our students be set apart,” Jensen said. “The challenge does that by giving students skills that are directly transferable into the work place.”

For the competition, the teams worked on a practical contest to gain skills and understanding of an online marketing campaign. Each team had a three-week window in which it designed an effective campaign for a business. The marketing campaign included outlining a strategy, running a campaign, assessing results and providing a business with recommendations to further develop its online marketing.

The businesses chosen by the student teams had to meet two criteria: within the past six months, the businesses needed to have a Web page and must not have used AdWords, the text or graphic advertisements that appear on Google search pages whenever users enter keywords into Google’s search engine.

Jensen encouraged her students to use local businesses. 

“For me, an important aspect of the challenge was connecting local business with the university and the business college,” Jensen said. “By choosing local businesses, students could and did present to a real client.”  

Four of the five businesses chosen were based in northwest Arkansas: Bordinos, a restaurant and bar; the Pink Papaya, a salon and spa; My Brother’s Salsa, a wholesale salsa company; and Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, a developing museum. The fifth marketing plan was developed for a Florida-based artist.

Each registered team received $200 worth of free online advertising with Google. Teams had to write two papers, one before the campaign that explained why they chose the company and a follow-up paper explaining how they completed the campaign. 

The five-member team that chose Crystal Bridges had a rocky start. The team developed a national search-marketing campaign for AdWords but had trouble because of the ubiquity of one of the team’s keywords – Wal-Mart. Because Crystal Bridges was started by Alice Walton, daughter of Wal-Mart founder Sam Walton, and the Walton Family Foundation, the team thought it was logical to put “Wal-Mart” as a keyword for their search campaign.

The term raised the “cost-per-click,” or the cost an advertiser pays to the Google each time a visitor clicks on the advertiser's ad, and hurt the team’s quality score, Google’s rank of the relevance of keywords to advertising. This prevented the group from performing a cost-effective search campaign, so a content campaign was chosen for the museum instead. The low quality score charged the team from $10 to $100-per-click, said Brian Leach, a software developer in Fort Smith, Ark., and the computer coordinator for the Crystal Bridges team.

“We had hits from all over the world,” Leach said. “Nearly every country had hit the Web site.”

By the end of the team campaign, there were more than 100 clicks a day – a total of more than 1.87 million impressions in the three weeks – for a museum that hasn’t even opened.

“I thought it was really interesting that I can take control of a whole Web campaign from a desktop,” Leach said.

Paul Tillery, a member of the Crystal Bridges team, suggested that the museum use the Google tools to target important areas such as the New York City region, which has a large interest in museums such as Crystal Bridges, according to the results from the Google campaign. 

“The key for Crystal Bridges is to get awareness out,” Tillery said.

Although campaigns ran on national and local levels, the Crystal Bridges team tracked more than 1,500 clicks to the museum’s Web site and saw a noticeable increase in people requesting the museum’s newsletter.

Because team members were scattered across the country, they met through e-mail and Skype video calls. They used programs such as GoToMyPC, so they could access a primary project computer while they were conferencing across the country.

“It’s the future of marketing,” said Jacque Martini, another member of the Crystal Bridges team, who lives in California.

Cody Beutelschies, a Bordinos Restaurant team member, said he used the challenge to learn how the search engine worked in general. He discovered that it is based on relevance and the bidding of each business for the advertisement spots. 

“It’s something I’ve always used,” Beutelschies said. “I just didn’t know how it worked. I am now a looker at the right side of Web pages.” 

The Google Marketing Challenge is separating these students from the rest because all will be proficient in this real-world skill, Jensen said.

This is the second year for the online competition. The first year had more than 1,500 campaigns for businesses worldwide.

The team reports and campaigns are judged by a panel of independent academics from all over the world.

The competition’s Global winners will receive a trip to the Googleplex in Mountain View, Calif., to meet with the team that developed AdWords. Internationally, six regional winners will receive a trip to their local Google office.

“For many companies, being on the Internet is a vital component of businesses,” Jensen said.   “It’s brilliant of Google.”

To learn more about the Google Online Marketing Challenge, go to http://www.google.com/onlinechallenge/index.html.