It took my friends very little convincing to sign them up on a team for the Google Online Marketing Challenge (OMC). For me, the Google OMC was an opportunity to learn how to use Google Ads with the pressure of managing an active Ads account from a real non-profit. Not only am I interested in digital marketing, and therefore was aiming to develop practical skills, I was keen on learning how to use Google Ads to create effective campaigns for my own entrepreneurial endeavours.

I was appointed Team Captain and completed the two prerequisite courses on X and Y. These courses taught me the theory and language used by the Google Ads platform. Nonetheless, when it came time to log into our client’s Ads account and see the dashboard in its entirety, it definitely took some more learning on the job. Still, the dashboard does a good job of touring the user through its many settings and nicely complemented the the theory that I had already learned.

The Non-Profit’s New Strategy

The non-profit we were assigned was the Orchestra of St. John’s (OSJ), which aims to change lives through music and provides musical events for children with autism, adults with dementia, and refugees. When we first met with OSJ, the manager of their Google Ads account had recently left, and our partner was therefore hoping to learn more about the tool as well.

After our initial meeting, our team put together a plan to overhaul OSJ’s Google Ads campaigns to reflect their new priorities. A significant amount of revenue came from concert ticket sales, and with all of their concerts being cancelled in the very early days of the pandemic, we had to strategise how they can best be supported by Google Ads. Our new strategy was split into four campaigns: promoting CD sales instead of concert tickets, raising awareness and educating about OSJ’s mission, attracting volunteers, and cultivating donors.‍

The Difficulties of Remote Working

The lockdown impacted our team dynamics as well. We quickly had to learn how to collaborate remotely from five different countries and three different timezones. It became apparent how motivating just being together in-person can be. Although the technology has come a long way, the inability to speak over each other and teetering connection quality really disrupts the natural flow of conversation and excitement for the task at hand.

Because it wasn’t required for the rest of my team to complete the prerequisite courses, I had to boil down the concepts that I learned and walk them through the dashboard. There’s a certain amount of trust required to delegate tasks, and because we didn’t all have the same know-how, it was quite a challenge to figure out how to save time and still produce high-quality work. For effective delegation, I learned that it is equally important to know the skills and interests of your individual team members as well as the skills required by each task.

I figured the most time-consuming task was creating the individual ads for each campaign, so we covered the process together for one campaign, which helped educate the team about Google Ads’ functionality, and then delegated out the other campaigns individually while I remained on call for support.

The Final Presentation

For the final presentation, we used the Google Slides template recommended on the OMC homepage, which we tweaked to suit our context and objectives. We also found it necessary to add more explanation to our slides as we wanted something that our partner could reference in future when reviewing the campaigns.

Our campaigns had varied performance but overall were quite successful at achieving OSJ’s objectives. The campaigns to attract volunteers and cultivate donors had low click-through rates which we eventually paused. Being quicker to adapt our approach would’ve helped us focus more on the already successful campaigns. In terms of conversions, our campaign to promote CDs in lieu of the cancelled concerts was most successful: we sold four times more CDs in one month compared with the entire previous quarter. In terms of raising awareness for OSJ’s mission, our ads received 255% more impressions and the website received 22% more visitors compared with the previous month.

We encouraged our partner to discuss or ask questions at any time during the presentation in order to make it more interactive. This helped clarify what we learned, the outcomes of our campaigns, and what that all means for OSJ. I was extremely happy to see that by the final presentation, every member from my team answered these questions confidently and clearly and that our presentation was well-received by the non-profit partner.