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Sales of a children's book are likely to soar after a hugely successful online marketing campaign that won a UWA team a global competition.

Six students from Professor Jamie Murphy's postgraduate eMarketing unit beat 3,034 teams around the world to win this year's Google Online Marketing Challenge.

Their strategies increased visitors to the website of children's book The Adventures of Charlie and Moon by a staggering 800 per cent.

Each team was given the equivalent of $200 to spend on a Google AdWords campaign over three weeks. The AdWords program allows business to run sponsored links on Google searches based on key words that users are likely to type in when searching for products or services.

Ganesh Chaudhari, one of the winning team, said the highly competitive children's book market posed a big challenge for the students. "Big multinational companies spend good money and usually have full-time professionals working on their online marketing campaigns," he said "Throughout this challenge, we were competing with them, but with restrictions of budget and time."

Professor Murphy, who initiated the competition in 2008, along with a former student and Google employee, Lee Hunter, said the Challenge was a great teaching and learning experience.

It is the second time UWA has won the Challenge, with a team winning the inaugural competition in 2008. They beat 1,620 teams. This year, the size of the competition almost doubled.

The winning team's prizes are a trip to Google headquarters in California in October and a laptop each.

Business students were also successful in the local Deloitte Dream Team competition, winning second and third prizes.

The students, all studying commerce or economics, applied online to enter the competition to address a realistic business case study.

Published in UWA News , 6 September 2010