Last week I was up in Seattle for the sold out SMX: Advanced conference. This was my first SMX: Advanced and I found that my mind was stimulated for the entire show, which was not the case at SMX: West. At the Advanced conference the panels took a deep dive into the tactics and strategies that make their companies succeed, which I found fascinating. I was introduced to new 3rd party tools that I was not aware of, and I have already implemented strategies discussed at the conference in some of our clients accounts.
The Mad Scientists of Paid Search
- Using automation at every point possible is a must. The only area where automation is not suggested is when you are looking at replacing ads or keywords.
- When Doing keyword research look at keywords that do not have last click conversions attributed to them and ensure that they are not part of the conversion funnel before pausing/deleting
New Best Practices in an Enhanced Campaign World
- Enhanced campaigns are horrible. You will lose money… Google will make more money.
- They did give one case study where profits increased slightly
What’s Hot with Paid Social
- Using paid social to promote high quality content that is sharable is an easy way to get more likes and drive traffic to your site (which can then lead visitors to completing a conversion).
- Twitter has new paid advertising options. You are able to buy a hash tag for 24 hours (your tweet will be on the top of that hash tag for 24 hours)
- Linkedin brings high quality visitors to B2B sites. To get banners on their site it requires a large commitment (15k). They also have PPC ads that cost slightly more than Google, however they bring more relevant visitors to B2B companies.
Big Data + Big Math = Exponential Search Performance
- To use big data to create knowledgably decisions you need to use a 3rd party tool such as DoubleClick, Marin, or Kenshoo.
- Learning to use pivot tables in Excel is necessary in navigating the Big Data maze.
From the Keynotes
- Matt Cutts is hilarious!
- Singh Pall (Microsoft) was talking about how Bing is trying to incorporate Bing Search in things that consumers use on a daily basis: TV, Xbox, phones, etc. they believe this is the future and they are concentrating their efforts on this. Bing has been growing extremely fast, most of the growth is from its implementation with other products.
Pro-level Tips to Succeeding at Retargeting
- Using multiple retargeting platforms is better than just using Google Remarketing because if Google makes changes it won’t affect your remarketing efforts as dramatically.
- A case study showed that targeting users that have searched for your products or services and have not been to your site yields higher ROI and click through rates than traditional retargeting. Using big data to target users who show interest in your products / services that have not visited your site can also be profitable.
- Facebook has opened up its News Feed to retargeting. There are about 8 companies that currently have access to the FBX new feed (we retarget on the FBX News Feed with AdRoll).
Rocking it with PLAs
- Using an All Products PLA campaign is a bad idea, it does not allow the granularity that is essential in optimizing bids based on product performance.
- Breaking campaigns down into Ad Groups that only have one product per ad group is the easiest way of controlling your bids and ad copy at a product level.
- It is also possible to use 3rd party bid management tools like DoubleClick to simplify this process.
Amazing Paid Search Tactics and Tools
- Using scripts makes it easy to automate tasks at a large scale. For companies that do not use 3rd party bid management tools, using scripts to easily access data and make mass changes is essential.
If you would like to know more about SMX: Advanced or would like information on having Emarketed manage your paid search accounts, please contact us.
