Students in Lyle Wetsch’s Internet Marketing class are giving local organizations a leg up with their online advertising, thanks to the Google Online Marketing Challenge.

Each student team receives $200 US worth of advertising in Google’s AdWords campaign. Using that capital, the teams partner with small businesses to set up an AdWords account and structure an online marketing campaign. For three weeks, the teams optimize and refine their campaigns.

The response from the local business community has been overwhelmingly positive.

“Many local businesses want to be advertising online, they recognize it’s a critical part of where they want to go, but they don’t have the knowledge base or skill set to make it happen,” explained Professor Wetsch. “This competition gives them the chance to try the AdWords program with no capital and see how it can work for them.”

The AdWords program works by matching keywords supplied by organizations to relevant Google searches. Organizations set a price for each word that determines where their ad will be positioned when their terms are used, and they are only charged when their ads are clicked on by Google users.

Throughout the competition students have the ability to modify their keywords and pricing based on the market. This real-time, interactive component is what appealed to Professor Wetsch.

“Often in courses we try to simulate reality by having students create business plans or work on cases, but this project is reality," he said. "If their campaign isn’t getting the results they want, it’s not because of their professor’s opinion, it’s the actual market response.”

Right now 10 undergraduate student teams are involved in the competition and MBA teams will begin the challenge in April. 

The competition is judged by a group of independent global academic panel. Global and regional winners will be announced in July. 

Memorial is one of only five Canadian schools participating and has the most student teams of all Canadian schools. Around the world there are 20,000 students from 61 countries taking part in the challenge.