AdWords Campaign Part of Business Degree Courses

University Students Learn Marketing, Google Advertising Campaigns

Aug 11, 2009 Shelley Aylesworth-Spink

Business students at Michigan State University and Eastern Michigan University gain degree experience by partnering with nonprofits to build AdWords campaigns.

A successful Google AdWords campaign allows organizations, both profit and nonprofit, to achieve specific goals to raise awareness, funds or revenue.

This success is now better understood by students at Michigan State University and Eastern Michigan University who gained pay-per-click, or PPC, campaign knowledge by being paired with nonprofit grant recipients through a Google grant program.

AdWords in the Curriculum is a project that began by Google in Ann Arbor, Michigan. The program builds degree experience by involving undergraduate and MBA students at the two Michigan universities.

AdWords PPC Campaign Education Adds to Business Program Degree Experience

Two key elements used by the students to maximize the use of Google advertising for the nonprofit groups were refining keyword lists and selecting the most appropriate landing pages.

One of the nonprofits, Looking For My Sister, is focused on anti-domestic violence. The university students built a Google AdWords campaign that resulted in a dramatic increase in online donations.

AdWords Marketing Part of University Degree Program

In this case, the business students recommended that the nonprofit use keywords most commonly found in the Keyword Performance Report and Search Query Performance Report through Google.

This data allowed the students to eliminate any keywords not associated with the anti-domestic violence mission of the nonprofit. The students learned that the name of the organization, while compelling, does little to draw web users, and potential donors, into the site.

Also, the AdWords campaign lesson focused on the importance of continuously revising and re-centering keyword lists to deflect from irrelevant web traffic.

Eastern Michigan University Students Learn Importance of AdWords Marketing, Landing Pages

Eastern Michigan students worked on an AdWords campaign for Heritage Works’ Youth Zone webpage. Heritage Works promoted cultural understanding across generations between youth of African descent and families.

Youth Zone is a page within the nonprofit’s website that has links to cultural education games. The business students build an online advertising campaign that lead users to the unique and interesting games page and not to the organizational homepage.

By using the target web page as the landing page, the students were able to drive web traffic in a more targeted manner and bring more children to the site in order build an understanding of identity and family background.

The results were that each of the nonprofit AdWords campaigns had high click-through rates. These rates measure the success of an online advertising campaign by describing the number users who click on a web page ad divided by the number of times the ad was delivered.

In addition, many of the nonprofit groups invited the students to join as interns when the term ended and students gave positive feedback about the business program degree course.

Degree experience by performing community service comes in many forms and students at Michigan State University and Eastern Michigan University turned a need to earn business courses towards a degree into valuable learning focused on campaign advertising and the power of Google AdWords.

The copyright of the article AdWords Campaign Part of Business Degree Courses in Universities is owned by Shelley Aylesworth-Spink. Permission to republish AdWords Campaign Part of Business Degree Courses in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.

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