Top 3 Takeaways from SMX Advanced 2013

This year was my 7th trip to SMX Advanced in Seattle. As always, it felt like homecoming for SEMs – I saw so many friends, it’s hard to keep track! I especially enjoyed hanging out with fellow members of PPC Chat, sharing knowledge and thoughts about the conference.

A search conference is no good without takeaways that you can apply to your day to day work. Here are my top 3 takeaways from this year’s SMX Advanced.

Enhanced campaigns are a nightmare.

As expected, there was an entire session dedicated to Enhanced Campaigns. Each and every presenter on the panel was pessimistic about what they’ve seen so far. The consensus was that it’s nearly impossible to control and isolate mobile traffic to optimize for ROI. This is a huge issue that I’ve written about before, and so far Google has made no moves to fix it. We’re stuck with convoluted workarounds and complicated bid modifiers that complicate campaign structure and management, rather than simplify it as Google claims is the intent of Enhanced Campaigns.

Furthermore, Enhanced Campaigns don’t play well with some Adwords features, namely Conversion Optimizer. If you’re using Conversion Optimizer, be aware that you can’t use bid modifiers with it. Crazy.

And finally, Enhanced Campaigns are killing ROI. Jeff Allen from PPC Hero presented a case study showing that CPAs went way up with Enhanced Campaigns – specifically, mobile CPAs increased by 40%. Mobile spend also increased dramatically, due to the lack of control.

We can only hope that Google fixes these issues before the forced migration in July.

Bing is doing some cool stuff.

I had the huge honor of visiting the Bing Ads offices in Bellevue with my good friend Ping Jen. I met with several of their development teams, including the Desktop team, the keyword relevance team, and the Ad Intelligence team. While I can’t share specifics about our conversations, what I can say is that there are some very interesting and useful tools and improvements on the near horizon that will really take your Bing Ads campaigns to the next level. Bing is dedicated to succeeding in the search space, and they’re allotting significant brain power to making things work.

And really, if ever there was a good time for this, it’s now. Bing has a window of opportunity to eclipse Google in several areas, including innovation, control, relevance, and customer service. Google really ticked off the SEM community with Enhanced Campaigns, and we’re looking for alternatives. Bing is poised to be a viable alternative, folks.

Wednesday’s keynote speaker at SMX Advanced was Gurdeep Singh Pall from Bing. I normally take keynotes with a grain of salt – they’re usually very high-level and theoretical with few takeaways. But this keynote really got me thinking. Gurdeep talked a lot about the future of search and the way Xbox has changed the landscape. Voice search and even search with gestures is the wave of the future – and people don’t talk the way they type.

The implications for PPC’ers are huge. Not only will we have to rethink our keyword and ad copy strategy in view of voice search, we’ll have to figure out how to target searches by gesture. It’s almost mind-boggling, but the bottom line is, in 5 years our jobs will look very different than they do now. Star Trek is here, folks.

star trek

Opt-Out geotargeting works better.

The very last presentation of the conference in the PPC track was by Marta Turek of Mediative. She presented a geotargeting case study that changed the way I think about geotargeting.

In a nutshell, she and her team noticed that geotargeted campaigns didn’t seem to perform as well as they should. CPCs were significantly higher on their geo campaigns than on their national campaigns, and over time, they saw attrition of search volume & traffic.

So they tried an experiment. They’d been targeting Denver, CO. They replicated the campaign and instead of targeting the Denver DMA, they targeted the entire state of Colorado – and excluded every DMA except Denver.

The result? Significantly higher volume, and CPCs that were about 30% lower than on the geotargeted campaign – and, of course, way better ROI.

Just to make sure this wasn’t a fluke, they tried the same tactic on another campaign targeting a couple of DMAs in North Carolina. They saw the same results – more volume and better ROI. Marta called the tactic “opt-out geotargeting.”

She admitted that these weren’t perfect tests. Both tests were sequential, rather than simultaneous – they ran an opt-in campaign first, and then recreated it as an opt-out campaign. There were seasonal factors at play, in addition to campaign optimizations such as ad copy testing that could have skewed the results. Still, it was surprising enough to be worth sharing.

As I looked around the room during this session, I could see people furiously taking notes. You could almost hear the wheels turning in the collective heads in the room.

At the end of the session, moderator Matt Van Wagner made a promise to the room: If anyone else tested this technique side by side and got valid results, Matt would write it up for Search Engine Land and guarantee them a speaking slot at next year’s SMX Advanced. Wow.

All in all, it was yet another great SMX Advanced. Did you attend the conference? What did you think? Didn’t attend and have questions? Share in the comments!

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Search Marketing Conferences: Do Women Speakers Get The Shaft?

girlpowerAh, the battle of the sexes. It’s been raging since the dawn of time, and will continue long after we’re all gone from this earth. Most of the time, I don’t pay much attention to all the flap. Over the past few weeks, however, there have been a couple of well-researched and well-thought-out posts about why search marketing conferences don’t have more women speakers, and they got my attention.

I covered the first one in an earlier post. Marty Weintraub from aimClear did a great job interviewing female conference speakers, myself included. Go back and read the post if you didn’t already.

Today, Hannah Miller from State of Search published a follow-up post on the topic – and the points she made completely changed the way I’d thought about the dearth of female speakers at search marketing conferences.

Women are more compliant than men.

Hannah posits that women get lower speaker ratings because they’re more compliant than men.

Let’s face it – people love a good brawl. Long-time search conference attendees will remember some of the legendary shouting matches and black-hat vs. white-hat panels that never failed to entertain. How many women were on those panels? Very few, and those that dared participate were given labels such as “SEO Bitch.” Nice.

But most of us women won’t stick our necks out like that. We follow the guidelines that are given to us by conference organizers. We stick to the time allotted. We turn in our presentations on time. We don’t pitch from the podium. We give carefully measured answers during the Q&A.

As I think back on all the conferences I’ve attended recently, there were speakers who ran way over their allotted time. There were speakers who were obviously unprepared, or worse, recycled a presentation from another conference, complete with the other conference’s logo! And there were speakers who pitched from the podium and asked for business cards.

Every last one of them was a man.

Women are too hard on themselves.

Because we are compliant, we’re not as “memorable,” maybe. Playing by the rules isn’t interesting. So we don’t get stellar speaker ratings. When we get lower speaker ratings, we tend not to pitch again.

This sure rang true for me. While low ratings haven’t kept me from pitching (because I love speaking too much to quit!), I still get discouraged by them. A few years ago, one of the comments on my session was that I “didn’t seem confident about the topic.” I was speaking about small-budget search, which was the majority of my day-to-day job at the time! I was totally confident about this!

Even in my most recent speaking gig, the ratings I got didn’t match my perception: both in terms of preparation and the vibe in the room. My first panel was one I had pitched and prepared for. I’d practiced my presentation thoroughly. Throughout the presentation, I got head-nods and smiles from the room. People asked good questions. And I got lackluster ratings.

The second presentation was one I hadn’t prepared for at all. I was subbing for a speaker who’d fallen ill at the last minute and couldn’t make it. I was totally going off-the-cuff. And I got 4.5 out of 5 stars.

The point is, we’re our own worst critics anyway. If we get bad ratings, we blame ourselves. If men get bad ratings, they blame the environment.

Girl Power

I’m by no means saying that all women are wimps and all men are self-absorbed jerks. Nor am I saying that conference organizers are totally biased. Most speakers follow the rules, regardless of gender. And we all get bad ratings at times.

What I am saying is that the facts are clear: women are under-represented as speakers at search marketing conferences. And it’s time we changed that.

If you’re a woman in search and have thought about speaking, now is the time! Got any speaking tips, man or woman? Share in the comments!

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Auditing PPC Campaigns – My SMX Presentation

Well, another SMX Advanced has come to a close.  The conference always goes by shockingly fast, with so much great information sharing and networking going on.

This year, I had the honor of presenting in the Auditing PPC Campaigns session.  Each presenter on the panel discussed a different aspect of auditing campaigns for better performance.  It was a fun session with lots of info shared.

With that, here is my presentation from SMX Advanced.  Enjoy!

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PPC Networking – The Fun Begins

Welcome to March! The long, cold winter is nearly over, and we anxiously await the longer days and melted snow…. Oh, wait – we’ve barely had any snow, at least here in Michigan. But who doesn’t get excited about the coming of spring?

I get excited about spring because it means search conference season! Actually, every season is search conference season nowadays, unlike 5-10 years ago when there was really just SES. But in the spring, it’s easier to travel, and it just “feels” more like conference season to me.

As I write this, SMX West is wrapping up. I didn’t attend that show – the west coast is a long trip for me, especially in February when the weather can be iffy (although, as mentioned earlier, it ended up not being so iffy). But a lot of people clearly did, as evidenced by the Twitter fail whale caused by the volume of tweets from the conference. By all accounts, SMX West was full of good content for PPC pros.

On the heels of SMX West, SEMs will head to the East Coast for SES New York, happening March 19-23. Although I won’t be attending this year’s SESNY, the conference has a special place in my heart – it was the first SES I ever attended, way back in 2003 when it was still held in Boston. In a way, that’s where it all began for me. SES is always a good show, and this one promises to be no different.

And then in April, the good folks over at PPC Hero and Hanapin Marketing are holding the inaugural Heroconf on April 16 & 17. I’m super excited about this conference, because it’s the first-ever conference focused solely on PPC. The PPC Hero team has assembled a superstar lineup of PPC speakers, including some of my “idols” like Andrew Goodman and Matt Van Wagner.

I am honored to have been invited to speak at this conference – I’ll be speaking twice on Monday: Account Structure at 10:30 am, and Managing Large Budgets at 2:30 pm. I’ll also be on the Q&A panel at 6:15 pm. Whew! It promises to be a great couple days of PPC networking and knowledge. If you’re a PPC pro and haven’t registered for HeroConf yet, what are you waiting for? Do it now!

Following HeroConf, the summer SEM conference season kicks off with SMX Advanced in Seattle in June. This is one of my favorite conferences – it’s smaller than the big SES and SMX shows, and the content is all advanced – no beginner topics allowed! Seattle is a great city, and the conference is super fun.

I know it can be tough to break away from the daily PPC grind to attend a conference, and they’re not always cheap. But just like any profession, PPC is constantly changing and evolving, and its practitioners need to stay up to date on the latest tools and techniques. I can’t think of a more open and sharing industry to be in, and I have conference networking to thank for my last couple jobs in SEM. It’s really worth it to attend!

What conferences are you excited about in 2012?

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Top 3 Takeaways from SMX Advanced, aka Homecoming for SEMs

Last week, I attended my 4th SMX Advanced in Seattle. It’s probably my favorite SEM conference of all because there are no beginner sessions. Every session covers advanced ways to improve your SEM and social media campaigns.

As usual, there was a ton of great info shared – I have 15 pages of notes from just the sessions I attended! Here are the top takeaways from this year’s conference.

Quality Score is Complicated.

OK, we all probably knew that. The Quality Score session was top-notch, though – I consider myself pretty knowledgeable on this subject, but I learned a TON. I especially enjoyed my friend Joe Kerschbaum’s talk on quality score for adCenter. Turns out, landing page relevance does count in adCenter – it’s one of their key factors. (I believe it’s a significant factor in Adwords, too, but that’s another post.)

Quality Score is so complicated that there’s a new book out about it – and it costs a whopping $149. Are you kidding me?!? Craig, I have a ton of respect for you, but the book is like 75 pages! That’s nearly $2 per page. Really??

Anyway.

Tweeting and Facebook are SEO.

There was a session on Twitter SEO and another on Facebook SEO. I attended the Twitter session and took copious notes. I’m not an SEO, but I do oversee the entire search marketing program at Fluency Media, so I try to learn as much as I can about SEO.

Incorporating both good social tactics (create quality, shareable content; engage with people, etc.) and good SEO tactics (make content relevant, use good keywords, link to deep pages, etc.) makes it very possible for your Twitter content to show up in search results pages. With both Google Panda and Bing, social signals are becoming more and more a part of the SEO algorithm – so it makes sense to optimize your social content as well as your website content.

Link Building is Almost Impossible.

I’m really trying to get my head around link building. And I’ll admit: I’m struggling. It just seems to take tons of time for very little payoff.

But I was optimistic: there are some really good link builders out there, and they were at SMX. So I sat at a link building Birds of a Feather table, and also attended a link building session.

The big takeaway? Link building is really hard, and often is just luck. On top of that, it’s nearly impossible for an agency to do link building for clients. It just doesn’t scale well. This is what I suspected all along, but had hoped I was wrong. Oh well.

PPC People are Awesome.

This year, I saw so many friends from the PPC industry that I joked about it being like homecoming for SEMs. I realize that I’m an old-time PPC’er, and I’ve been going to conferences since 2003, so I’ve met a ton of folks over the years. But I’m continually thrilled with how friendly and open everyone is. People freely share give-it-up style secrets, test ideas, tips, and tricks – it’s such a welcoming and collaborative community.

This year, about 10 participants in the weekly Twitter PPCChat met for dinner in Seattle on Monday night, the night before the first day of the show. Even though I’d only met a couple of the attendees before, it was like we were all fast friends. And indeed we were, because we knew each other on Twitter!

Anyway, the dinner was great, and the PPCChat group ended up hanging out throughout the whole conference. Even though SMX is smaller than most SEM conferences, it can still be hard to navigate the dynamics of a group of several hundred people. But as with homecoming, it’s a lot of fun if you hang out with a smaller group of friends – and that’s just what we did.

I learned so much at this year’s SMX, as usual. I’m already looking forward to next year!

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