Online Marketing Challenge

Judging Criteria

How will your team be judged?

Criteria for the AdWords Campaign

The contest has two components:

1. Campaign Statistics that Google will assess
2. Two written reports that academics will assess

To select finalists, Google first compares Campaign Statistics across all competing student teams. Google’s proprietary Campaign Statistics algorithm considers over 30 factors within an AdWords account to determine its online marketing effectiveness. The Campaign Statistics algorithm determines the rating for each campaign.

This algorithm ranks the top 15 accounts in each region (Asia/Pacific, Americas, Europe, Middle East/Africa). Google AdWords experts will then apply an extra level of rigor to select the top five in each region. The factors that they will use to judge each campaign will include campaign and ad group structure, keyword quality scores, use of product features such as ad extensions and dynamic keyword insertion (if applicable), utilizing ad text best practices, such as including a call-to-action phrase and matching ad text with the keywords in the ad group.

Finally, the independent Global Academic Panel reviews the Pre-Campaign and Post- Campaign Reports of the top five teams in each region to select the regional and global winners. It takes great Campaign Statistics to make the regional top five, and then great written reports to win. Over a dozen academics from all over the world helped develop the following written report grading criteria.

For full details on the evaluation criteria, please refer to the Competition Guidelines.

Criteria for the Social Media Award

There are three components:

1. Campaign Statistics that Google will assess
2. Google+ Performance Indicators that Google will assess
3. Social Media Strategy and Social Media Execution write ups that the Global Academic Panel will assess

Since the primary focus of the competition remains on AdWords, a team must excel in both AdWords and Google+ to be a contender for the Social Media Award. To be a semi-finalist for the Social Media award, the team must both place among the top 15 teams in each region (using the campaign statistics algorithm based on AdWords performance, irrespective of Google+ performance), as well as have a Google+ page. Therefore, there is a maximum of 60 semi-finalist teams. Google will then review each of the semi-finalist teams on the performance of their social media campaign.

The Google+ pages must meet minimum requirements:

• Must be a new or inactive page (no posts or updates for the last one month)
• Must have description of company and link to website in About section
• Must have a profile picture
• Must post at least twice per week during the 6-week contest time frame (total of 12 posts)
• Must host at least two Hangouts during the 6-week contest time frame

Google will hand pick the top 3 teams in each region by judging the plus pages based on the factors including but not limited to number of +1s, number of followers, use of features like social extensions, hangouts and frequency and quality of postings

Finally, an independent panel of academic judges will then judge the quality of each Social Media Finalist’s Google+ Page, Social Media Strategy and Social Media Execution Write ups to select the winners. The winners of this award remain eligible for the main GOMC award as well.

Please refer to Competition Guidelines for more details on the award, reports and judging details.

Criteria for the Social Impact Award

If your team chose a non-profit organization, you can be eligible for Social Impact Award if you submit an Impact statement along with the Post Campaign Report in the following format. The impact statement, judged by the Social Impact Award Panel, should consist of verification information (official name, website address, physical address and contact person) and answer the five questions below:

1. How is the nonprofit making a social impact?
2. How did you design the AdWords campaign to meet the nonprofit's goals?
3. Summarize the campaign results in 100 words or less.
4. Explain how the AdWords campaign impacted the nonprofit's mission?
5. Would you advise the nonprofit to change any aspects of their online campaign in the future to better accomplish their goals?

Here are some good reports from our past year Challenge: sample_reports.zip

For full details on the evaluation criteria, please refer to the Competition Guidelines