My students and I have been working with recipients of Google AdWords grants for two years. These grants provide non-profits with an advertising budget of up to $10,000/month for ads that appear on Google's search engine results pages when people type in the appropriate search terms (keywords). AdWords is challenging for the average non-profit. It requires mastery of three things:

• Keyword selection
• Ad text creation
• Web design for the landing page reached by the person clicking on the ad

Our first course focused on all of these elements. In the course, university students learning AdWords team up with non-profits and build successful AdWords campaigns for them. In the final seminar, students present their campaigns to the non-profits and propose the landing pages they should use.

The problem was:

• Non-profits were not adopting the landing pages because they did not have the resources to implement.
• There was no real way to know whether the landing pages were effective. 

So, we created a second course where students worked on these two problems in conjunction with the non-profits. That course has yielded a couple of success stories that I will cover in the next two posts.