Students win a trip to Google

When Team AdHype first came together, their main purpose was to get an A in Professor Christoph Schneider’s Business Intelligence class, not to win an all-expenses paid trip to Google World Headquarters in California.

But the group of five BSU students did such an excellent job on their Google Online Marketing Challenge class project that they placed in the top three out of 700 competing teams in the Americas region and made the top ten out of teams worldwide.

"With more than 700 teams participating from this region," Pat Shannon, dean of Boise State’s College of Business and Economics, said, "being among the top three is an outstanding achievement."

"We really didn’t think our results would garner any prize," Lisa Chipman, a business major, said. "We just thought our results were pretty average."

Members involved in the group are Lisa Chipman, Trevor Herbst, Kasey Keller, Chris Mendonca and Lisa Mooers.

The team worked with Extreme Sports and Gear, a local shop specializing in ATVs, to increase traffic to the store’s website. They used Google AdWords, which has replaced pop-up ads on Google as the company’s marketing tool for online retailers.

When someone does a Google search, "if you’re looking to buy something, at the side you’ll have sponsored sites," explained Lisa Mooers, an information technology management major. "They pay Google to connect to the search words."

The trick for the group of students was to "try to make it so that when people did do searches for the product, it would show our ad on the first page and, ideally, show up at the top," Mooers said.

The team changed their online AdWords ad several times and checked it daily to see which keywords brought the most traffic.

"We had to pay attention to which products were getting the most attention," Mooers said. "We could specify, when someone searched for a word, whether or not that would trigger our ad."

Mooers said that pocket bikes were some of the most popular items sold by Extreme Sports and Gear, so the team geared their ad to reflect this. "The owner did notice his website got a lot more hits," said Chipman.

The group, along with their professor, will be visiting Google World Headquarters, located in Mountain View, California. They will stay overnight and attend an awards banquet as well as receive a tour of the Google campus.

And did Team AdHype get the A they were looking for? Yes, said Mooers.

JEN SAWMILLER
News Journalist

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