Michigan needs a practical lesson on the power and nuances of pay-per-click advertising. That’s why professor Bud Gibson has reshaped basic coursework at Eastern Michigan University’s College of Business to emphasize practical, applied instruction to school students on search engine marketing and Web design.

In tech-savvy California or Massachusetts, Gibson said, “everybody understands” the importance of effective search engine advertising.

“Around here, these skills are in scarce supply, so we’ve got to bump them up,” he said. “Where I see Michigan right now is we’ve really got to get branched into the digital economy.”

Gibson is leveraging an existing network of local entrepreneurs, tech companies and nonprofits to connect his EMU students with a real-life opportunity to learn practical Web marketing skills. Among his top strategies is to help nonprofits that have landed $10,000-a-month Google AdWords grants to effectively spend their money. His EMU students have worked directly with 25 nonprofits since winter 2008. The goals are to:

• Help the nonprofits use the $10,000 grants to drive more traffic to their sites. Gibson said the students have, on average, helped nonprofits increase their traffic 10-fold by an average of 12,000 to 16,000 unique visitors a month.

“We wound up really pumping people into the nonprofits’ Web pages,” he said.

• Improve the “conversion rate” for these sites - a term that refers to the percentage of times in which Web visitors complete a task that the organization desires them to complete. Gibson said the nonprofits have experienced an average of 20 to 30 times improvement in their conversion rate.

“That’s dramatic. It’s great for the nonprofits and it’s also great for the students, because the students get this learning experience,” Gibson said.

Practical experience is crucial to effectively learning search engine marketing, Gibson said.

His students are also working in a variety of internships this summer at local tech companies, including Menlo Innovations, where an intern is helping the Ann Arbor-based custom software developer improve its pay-per-click advertising.

“The ability to reach a worldwide audience is relatively inexpensive, and Bud is kind of showing us how to do it,” Menlo CEO Rich Sheridan said. “We reach a worldwide audience with our Google AdWords campaign, and we spend less than $1,000 a month in general on that.”

Gibson walks the walk with search engine marketing, too. His startup nonprofit, called Michigan Innovators, is fostering a Web destination where technology leaders, job seekers and other interested people can meet to learn about innovative Michigan companies and find new opportunities.

The site, MichiganInnovators.org, started in May 2007. It’s populated with one-on-one video interviews with innovative Michigan leaders.

Gibson said he’s leveraged his own $10,000-a-month Google grant to increase his traffic to about 10,000 visits a month. He’s also assembled a team of a few local leaders to use Twitter and Facebook to enhance the organization’s reputation.

“We still have a fairly skeleton crew but we’re able to magnify our impact far beyond what we could if it was just the three or four of us,” he said, “and these social media tools have allowed us to do it.”

-Nathan Bomey writes about technology and other topics for Ann Arbor Business Review. Contact him at (734) 302-1725 or nathanb@mbusinessreview.com.

Photo by Robert Ramey: Bud Gibson, professor at EMU's college of business.