SES Chicago: Winning PPC Tactics

November 16, 2012 By Leave a Comment

I’ve just returned from SES Chicago, one of my favorite search marketing conferences. It’s a favorite because I’ve been attending this conference since 2003.  And this year did not disappoint.  Not only was there a plethora of great PPC content, there were sessions on integrated marketing, content marketing, and even email. As always, I learned a lot.

This year, I had the honor of speaking at SES. In fact, I ended up speaking on 2 panels – one of them as a last-minute fill-in for my good friend Joe Kerschbaum, who was sick as a dog and couldn’t make it. It was great fun and I met a lot of smart people.

With that, here is my presentation from my planned session, Winning PPC Tactics, on What’s New in PPC. Let me know what you think!

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Intro to PPC: SES Chicago Presentation

November 23, 2011 By Leave a Comment

SES Chicago was last week, and as usual it was a great show with record attendance. This is one of my favorite search marketing conferences: it’s close to home for me (a mere 4 hour Amtrak ride), it has a Midwest feel, and attracts search newbies. I’ve always enjoyed teaching others – I come from a long line of teachers in my family.

This year, I was honored to do a solo presentation on Intro to Paid Search. This session is an SES mainstay, with a storied history of search industry luminaries as presenters: Dana Todd, who was one of the speakers I heard at my first SES back in 2003; Matt Van Wagner, a dear friend and one of my favorite speakers of all time; and Brad Geddes, another good friend and great teacher of PPC goodness. Honestly, I feel pretty out of my league following these superstars, but anyway…

I thoroughly enjoyed giving this presentation – like I said, I love to teach people about PPC, and the session attendees were engaged and asked great questions.

So with that, here is the presentation for your viewing enjoyment! I’d love to hear your feedback: share in the comments!

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Integrated Search Marketing – The Big Takeaway from SES Chicago

November 5, 2010 By Leave a Comment

It’s hard to believe that SES Chicago was 2 weeks ago already. As always, it was a great conference, with informative sessions and fantastic networking.

One common theme throughout several of the sessions I attended was integrated search marketing. Interestingly enough, we’ve been preaching the integration gospel at Fluency Media for a while now. A year ago, I wrote a series of articles for Search Engine Watch on integrating PPC with other online marketing channels. And now, it seems as though everyone’s on the integration bandwagon.

Nowhere was this more apparent than in the session called PPC or SEO: The Ultimate Search Marketing Battle. It wasn’t even a battle, really – both sides ended up saying that both PPC and SEO are necessary for maximum SEM success.

Despite my disappointment at the lack of blood in this session :), here are some of the key takeaways:

• Use PPC to inform SEO! Where have I heard this before?
• Integrating PPC with SEO yields better results, efficiency, and cross-channel intelligence.
• Combine the two to reduce your risk. You need to do both PPC and SEO to effectively mitigate your risk.
• Use SEO for niche, long tail terms. (I actually disagree with this – SEO works well for broader terms that are expensive in PPC, while PPC is great for niche & long tail terms.)
• Build your site with SEO in mind. I wish more companies did this!
• Build inbound links.
• PPC helps with immediate presence. (In other words, SEO takes time; PPC can bridge the gap until your SEO kicks in.)
• Use PPC for top ranking on competitive terms that you’ll never rank for organically.
• Use both to dominate real estate above the fold. A Google case study showed that top organic & paid listing increases unaided awareness by 17x!
• Resolution Media ran a test with their clients where they paused brand terms in PPC for a month to test. They found that not bidding on brand terms led to 42% overall decrease in traffic on paid AND natural search. I actually wrote an article for DM News on this very subject – we found that not bidding on brand terms also decreased direct traffic.
• Perform landing page testing in PPC to decide what pages to optimize for SEO. (GREAT advice!)

I thought these were great tips. Do you have any to add?

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Filed Under: integration, search engine marketing, ses chicago

Stretch Your Marketing Dollars – My SES Chicago Presentation Recap

October 29, 2010 By Leave a Comment

Last week, at SES Chicago, I was honored to be part of the panel on the “Stretch Your Marketing Dollars” session. I presented a case study on one of our Fluency Media clients, where we used PPC to inform SEO.

I love the challenge of working within a small budget. It forces me to get really creative as a PPC manager and make sure I’m spending every cent in the best way possible. In many ways, it’s easier to work with an unlimited budget than with a small, limited one – and it’s more rewarding to see huge results from a relatively small spend.

SES Chicago is somewhat unique in that it tends to attract more in-house SEMs, as well as a lot of newcomers to search. The Stretch Your Marketing Dollars session was no exception – when I polled the audience to find out how many in-house vs. agency folks we had in the room, at least 2/3 of them were in-house SEMs.

I got a lot of great feedback after the session – one person even told me they took pages of notes! I hope the information in the presentation helps you too.

Have you had to work with a small budget? What did you do? What were the results?

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Speaking at SES Chicago

November 3, 2009 By Leave a Comment

SES Chicago is happening in the Windy City December 7-11. I’ve been attending SES since 2003, and it’s always a fun and worthwhile conference.

This year, I’ll be speaking for the first time, and in two sessions to boot! Both are on Wednesday. The first is “Facebook Rockstars RoundTable: Marketing For the Other Internet,” with my good friend Marty Weintraub from aimClear. We’ll be discussing Facebook success stories, which should be a lot of fun.

The other session is the Pay-Per-Click Congruency Clinic, where we’ll take volunteers from the audience and make suggestions for aligning their keywords, ad copy, and landing pages. I’ve learned a lot from the SES Clinics, having “taken one for the team” more than once. I’m honored to be able to offer my expertise to others.

If you haven’t already done so, you can register and get the Early Bird rate before Nov. 20. There are also discount codes floating around out there, so be on the lookout for those to save even more.

Be sure to stop by and say hi – I love meeting my fellow SEMs! See you in Chicago!

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SES Chicago – SEM In The Snow

December 9, 2008 By Leave a Comment

Day 2 of SES Chicago has come to a close – well, I know they’re still going strong down at the hotel bar, but the “official” day is over. It’s been a great conference so far – I’ve learned a lot of new things on a variety of topics, and of course the networking can’t be beat. I’ve been lucky enough to converse with David Szetela, Kevin Newcomb, Matt Van Wagner, Carrie Hill, Jim Hedger, and others; plus a lot of great vendors like Acquisio and Marin Software. In fact, it’s been hard to catch up with everyone I’d like to chat with!

Hard to believe the conference is more than half over already. While December is a busy month, it’s always worth it to take time out for a quality search conference.

If you’re here and I haven’t seen you yet, find me and say hi!

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