Overview:
In December of 2014, I had the opportunity to use the world’s first online marketing simulation, named “
Stukent“, in a class I was taking on electronic marketing. In a class of 43 students, we competed against each other in small groups over the course of the quarter, with a total of 6 rounds. The goal was to generate as many sales as possible of various tablets, and with the highest return on investment. I was selected team leader and ended up making 95% of the decisions over the course of the simulation, which meant setting up landing pages, creating email campaigns, managing SEM (both organic and paid), selecting keywords and adjusting bid amounts, and creating ad copy. I kept track of all metrics and decisions in Excel, and by the end of the course, was running 23 ad campaigns, 19 email campaigns (with multiple A/B tests), and 21 landing pages (with an average score of 91/100).
Results:
In one sentence: We placed in the two top for every single round, and
were the #1 team at the end of the simulation,
placing first in ROAS/ROI, traffic, market share… essentially every single metric.
Here is a breakdown of the improvement in our metrics by round:
| Round |
Impressions |
Clicks |
CTR |
CPC |
Conversion Ratio |
ROI |
CPA |
| Round 1 |
67,384 |
1,685 |
2.5% |
$0.81 |
7.6% |
2.99 |
$10.71 |
| Round 2 |
75,049 |
1,812 |
2.41% |
$0.80 |
7.51% |
2.99 |
$10.72 |
| Round 3 |
65,567 |
1,548 |
2.36% |
$0.65 |
9.56% |
4.46 |
$6.83 |
| Round 4 |
107,525 |
2,598 |
2.42% |
$0.50 |
10.66% |
6.43 |
$4.66 |
| Round 5 |
180,670 |
4,521 |
2.5% |
$0.55 |
12.12% |
6.51 |
$4.56 |
| Round 6 |
247,848 |
6,647 |
2.68% |
$0.56 |
13.54% |
7.42 |
$4.14 |
To summarize the improvements, we more than doubled our return on investment by the end, generating $7.42 per every dollar invested. Our cost per action decreased to less than 50% of its original value, as a result of our CPC falling even as click-through-rate, impressions, and conversion ratio all rose.
Even if you average our scores across the entire simulation, we still came out as the top ranking team:
