HETIC 2008 official Online Marketing Challenge Blog

Until now, display URL in an ADWORDS Ad didn’t have to be necessarily the same than landing page URL. Since april, GOOGLE has modified its guidelines and requirements about this.

« Starting in April, all the display URL for the new ads will be the URL of the page for related : no exception will be accepted. Please update your URL accordingly when creating new ads. »

To avoid click fraud and enhance Ads relevancy, GOOGLE has decided that display URL must now match landing page URL. This means they must use the same domain with no exception.

For example:

The following will still be correct:

Display URL : www.lanegourmet.com/Confitures
Landing URL : www.lanegourmet.com/PRODUITS/MIELS-ET-CONFITURES-28.html

The following will not be acceptable anymore:

Display URL : www.lanegourmet.com/Confitures
Landing URL : www.confiture&miel.com

If there’s something for sure about the GOOGLE ONLINE MARKETING CHALLENGE (GOMC), it’s that the competition will be tough! Indeed, more than 20,000 students, from 61 countries have taken part in the GOMC.

The main particularity of this challenge is that it’s open to all students. No need to be a marketing guru!!!

As testimony of the huge range of universities or colleges:
College of Aviation And Management Studies (Nigeria)
University of Otago (New-Zeland)
National Hotel and Tourism Institute (Yemen)
Pontificia Universidad Catolica del Peru (Peru) …

It’s pretty hard to find information about other competing teams. It seems that they’re not much talkative about their participation. While searching the Web (obviously via Google) I discovered GOMCHA, the unofficial social network for international teams competing in GOMC. In this website, I found out that most of the teams have already started their campaign.

I got in touch with a member of the social network (and also member of the Global Academic Judging Panel, but I wasn’t aware of it at first!), I learnt that about half of the teams have already accomplished their campaign.

I don’t really know how they managed to finish so fast because, while writting this post, we’re still working on our pre-campaign report!

Anyway, as the proverb says: “To win a race, the swiftness of a dart availeth not without a timely start“!

GOOGLE’s german business office has launched a new advertising campaign in order to promote its video service. You can see that Google use offline to talk about online service.

This Guerrilla marketing campaign is very unusual.

But that is not Google’s first try onto their services‘ promotion. Russia did the same when launching GMAIL and GOOGLE Maps.

Gmail Russia :

Google Maps :

We can say that it’s the offline advertising year to promote Web services and also the year of interactive billboards.

The main challenge in an ADWORDS campaign consists in finding the right keywords to bid on. Everyone has his own idea concerning the most relevant ones. Between team members, advertiser and suggestion tools, opinions are divided.

Furthermore, keywords choice is endless. Do we have to use website’s name ? Can we use brands names ? Is it relevant to use generic keywords ? How to get the most of our budget ? Discussion remains open. We now understand why strategy initially defined is so crucial. But the main question is : which keywords are the most relevant ones considering advertiser’s goal ?