Imagine the following scenario:   
You’ve been hired as the Online Marketing Manager for a company that sells tablet PCs. Along with your team you are responsible for the company’s digital marketing efforts (search engine advertising, email marketing, and landing page optimization). That means you manage a 15,000€ campaign budget!

You don’t need to be afraid as you will not spend that money in the real world. This is all part of a simulation called Simbound – The Digital Marketing Simula-tion (more detail is provided in Section 1.3). This simulation allows you to test different keywords and bidding strategies in search engine advertising (SEA), test different versions of emails to reach out to your existing customer base, and optimize your landing pages. All while you compete against other compa-nies that sell tablet PCs as well.

I myself will be the CMO of the company and you should convince me that you are doing a great job in figuring out how to sell tablet PCs online! The most im-portant question you should answer is what is my business goal and how can I get there?

After completing this course, students will be able to

1. calculate the most important online marketing metrics and discuss their advantages and disadvantages,

2. describe how SEA works and optimize a company’s SEA campaigns(campaign structure as well as bidding),

3. describe what A/B testing is and how it can be used to optimize email marketing campaigns as well as landing pages,

4. analyze data from digital marketing campaigns and use that data to make qualified recommendations for improving these campaigns, and

5. effectively communicate digital marketing strategies.

Phase 1: Before we start the simulation, I will teach you the fundamentals of digital marketing. The classes cover an introduction to digital marketing, search engine advertising (SEA), email marketing, landing page optimization, and a little bit of search engine optimization (SEO). At the end of this phase, we will have an exam.

Phase 2: Now, we can get started with the simulation! We will play 10 rounds overall. Because setting up the campaigns, is much more cumbersome than monitoring and adjusting them, you will get a full week to play round 1 and another full week to analyze the results of round 1. After that you will have 3-5 days for each of the rounds 2-5 and 2 days for each of the rounds 6-10.
In order to get the most out of the simulation and to allow to continuously improve your campaigns, we will have coaching sessions between round 1/2 and 7/8. In those sessions, your group has to present how you will adapt your campaigns in upcoming rounds based on results and data of previews rounds. Additionally, I will give you individual feedback and advice. After round 5, I ask you to present an interim presentation to the whole class. While the coaching sessions will take place without the other teams being present, the interim presentation is intended to take place in a plenary session with the whole class being present. You may exchange your experience and talk about challenges that you encounter during the simulation in that session.  

Phase 3: At the end of the simulation, you will get access to the campaigns and the whole dataset of one of your competitors in order to challenge their strategy in a peer review!

Your final grade on a 100% scale is calculated as follows:
40% of the final grade is based on the Exam (60 min.),
40% of the final grade is based on the Interim Presentation (20 min.), and the Peer Review (20 min.),
20% of the final grade is based on your rank in the simulation (winning team: 100%, 2nd team: 90%, 3rd team: 80%; 4th team: 70%, 5th team: 60%)

The transformation of your grade on the 100% scale looks like this:
1: 100% - 90.1%
2: 90% - 75.1%
3: 75% - 60.1%
4: 60% - 50.1%
5: 50% - 0%