New Guides from Google

[beu]

"The Google Online Marketing Challenge" is a program for college students but you might find the "Google Guides" created for this program informative too!

Guide to running your AdWords Account:
www.google.com/onlinechallenge/adwords_guide.pdf


Others:
http://www.google.com/onlinechalleng...etup_guide.pdf

www.google.com/onlinechallenge/student_guide.pdf

http://www.google.com/onlinechalleng...emic_guide.pdf


These are in some ways "Hot of the Press"! Please feel free to share your thoughts, opinions and/or review.

[adamap]

I've done some advising to some students in this challenge. Should have told them to RTFG!

[beu]

Originally Posted by adamap

I've done some advising to some students in this challenge. Should have told them to RTFG!

Ahhh yes... never a bad idea!

Are your students part of the "challenge"?

[j0nyDzine]

Yet again... Where was Google when I was in school!?
What a great project for students... Thanks Beu!

[JohnW]

Timely thread for me. I will share some random comments from my experience earlier this evening lecturing a post grad marketing class on SEO, where I found that many of the students are just getting ready to start competing in this Google program.

There were a lot of questions tonight about adwords and the subjects ranged from practice, strategy, evolutionary history - goto-overture-ysm, bid jamming, how it all changed with google, and keeps changing.

Quality score was discussed at length and it got interesting when we turned to page quality and how landing pages can be optimized to improve quality score.

This is where some interesting stuff came up. One thing that stood out to me was the challenges that the students were facing beyond the setup and admin of adwords. First they had to go find and sign up a client who had a website but had never used adwords. (Good marketing plan, Google!) This they were all able to do. However when it came time to discuss optimizing or creating landing pages, it was obvious that not only were most of the students clueless about how to create or edit a page, but they were stumped by the idea of it. Also, type of clients they selected were apparently just as bad. A look at the sites the students were working with showed a worse than usual rookie-website collection of flash, frames, poor keyword relevance, missing privacy policies etc.

Anyway, tomorrow some of the students will be talking to the site owners to see if needed changes can be made to the sites, while others will be looking for new, different "clients" who have a site that is in good enough shape to perform well without changes. Now they know what to ask for/look for.

I will be checking back with them to see how this all comes out.

[NewKidOnTheBlock]

However when it came time to discuss optimizing or creating landing pages, it was obvious that not only were most of the students clueless about how to create or edit a page, but they were stumped by the idea of it.

I find this interesting, because I bet most non-technical people think creating a website (even a simple one) is extremely difficult.

But what I find even more interesting is the principle behind the web and how it's really similar to word of mouth / viral marketing: TBL wanted HTML to be used instead of another mark-up language (do I remember this correctly?) because it was easier to learn for people. And if it's easier to learn more people will be able to participate and make websites and thus the idea of the web will spread.

The easier you make your idea to spread the further it will spread, so basically the web is like a viral marketing campaign (non-profit, though)..I'm wondering where the web would be if they had used a more complicated language than html.

I wasn't afraid of it because I'm into technical stuff, but to be quite honest I thought it'd be a lot harder to create a (basic) website than it turned out to be..as html (and even css) are very simple (yet most people think it must be hard).

[Discovery]

Yet again... Where was Google when I was in school!?
What a great project for students... Thanks Beu!

I think they were walking to school listening to Billy Squire on their sony walkmens.

Just be thankful we were all here and ready for the birth of the Internet in the mid 90's

Discovery

[AdWordsRep]

What a great thread this is!

AWR

[beu]

So true AWR and in addition to these, the "AdWords" and "Webmaster Tools" booklets are exceptionally grrrreat resources too. Great job!

[AdWordsRep]

Thanks for the kind words, beu. Really nice to hear that these were useful to you.

AWR