The University of Houston is winning again — this time, it's the 2011 Google Online Marketing Challenge global award.

UH graduate students Erin Blatzer, Lauren Davis, Carolina Thomas and Jeffrei Clifton, led by professor Steven Koch, worked together to create a Google AdWords campaign for the Houston Symphony. The team received the award at the Googleplex in Mountain View, Calif.

CultureMap spoke with the lucky ladies while they were still vacationing in the Bay Area. The four had just arrived back at their hotel, drenched from rain after a trip to Alcatraz, when we got the scoop on the Google challenge itself and the awards they received.

The goal of the challenge was to create an effective, three-week long ad campaign that intuitively directed Internet traffic to the website of each team's choice.

Each submission was judged on two components: 1) Ad effectiveness, based on a Campaign Statistics algorithm developed by Google, and 2) the strength of pre- and post-campaign written reports.

The team wanted to work with a nonprofit because they knew that, if they placed in the NGO Impact Award, the organization itself would win as well. And it just so happened that the marketing department for the Houston Symphony was considering AdWords as an advertising outlet when the team approached them.

"About 4,500 teams competed from different universities around the world," Blatzer explained. "Our team won globally and we placed third in the non-profit category, so the Houston Symphony will receive $5,000."

"Our team was the first team from America to ever win the global portion of the competition," Clifton said. "One of the awards we received was a seven day paid vacation to San Francisco."

Included in that was a tour of the Google campus, introductions to the AdWords team, exclusive access to Google food and a notorious TGIF meeting, and a raid of the Google employees-only store. And MacBook Pro laptops all around.

Congratulations ladies!