The 2008 Google Online Marketing Challenge results are in....

Our team posted a very high overall finish in the 2008 GOMC, we were semi-finalist in the United States. An overall ranking of 14th in the US is a very good performance for our group. We will soon get official certificates from Google to help celebrate this achievement.

The Final Paper is complete!!!

After much discussion and debate over what to write and how to present the information. Our team has completed the last task in the Google Online Marketing Challenge. The judging will conclude by July, so until them I cannot post any excerpts. I will do this after the winners are announced. I can say that overall our account performance was great and the many adjustments made were helpful.
Since this is the first year of the Challenge, do you think it can or will grow in the future?

Final Paper, Google Challenge, Data Collection

We are currently going over all the information and data collected on our AdWords account. The business owner has stated that,"the AdWords campaign was successful, and I received one confirmed sale as a result." Our team has seen first hand the return on investment (ROI) that this campaign can yield. Now back to the paper, we have mountains of information and ideas, but limited space to divulge this to our audience. I am usually not nervous about writing papers, but with so much on the line and such a divers audience, this will be a challenge......stay with us, more to follow.

Final milestone...

As we have entered the final phase of this competition. I think that we did a fair job as far as attracting web traffic is concerned. Since, we now have data, we are focusing on doing a much better job to critically analyze it and present our findings.

Thank you Google and Professor Moore...

I never thought of the logic behind Google search. Always had the idea that it was created by genius minds with brilliant algorithm. By participating in this competition, I came to realize, how simple ideas and simple tools can produce fantastic results. This competition has helped me unlock my understanding of Google, and I would give the credit to my Professor and Google.

Google AdWords really ADD UP.

From the discussions we had last week on the feedback from our business owner, the AdWords campaign had a huge impact on web traffic. We are currently reviewing the data for our final paper, but I can tell you a few highlights. Overall web traffic increased by more than 30% and the majority of web hits were from search engines, mainly Google. Our client did get a few calls and they were driven by our Ads. Right away it is easy too see that this small investment paid off, however if more time was put into further developing the campaign I believe the ROI would be significant. The Google Online Marketing Challenge is not over by any means, we have to complete our final paper and wait for the judges to decide both regional winners and the global winner. We will keep you posted until the end. May the Clicks be with you!!! (okay that was lame)

The end of of our campaign as we know it...

And I think we're fine. I definitely feel fine. I think the last time I wrote we were at roughly 65% utilization of our funds. Our client was mentioning that she'd had more traffic driven to her page but still not a lot of actual contacts for work. We then were gained access to her Google Analytics page and noticed a significan increase in traffic as well as an increased duration in the amount of time that users spend on the website.

Some of our Search Engine Optimization (SEO) suggestions were heeded and listened to by our customer and additional links were added to make the page much more navicable.

We definitely need to ramp up on generating formal reports and determine what changes we made, and quantify how the changes we made in our AdWords increased traffic to our client's website.

This was an excellent project for both us (as learners) and our client to learn how AdWords can help grow a business through marketing to users based on relevance in Google searches.

Over and out....