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My SMX Advanced 2011 Pictures and Recap

Posted by: Ian Comments: 12 comments so far

Jun. 09

I just got back from SMX Advanced Seattle and had such an amazing time. I always have so much fun at these conferences, but must say SMX Advanced Seattle 2011 was one of the best. Why? I really took time to network more than ever, as you can see in the many pictures throughout this post. Today, I’m really excited to talk about my epic experience at SMX and share tons of pictures (thirteen of them)!

Networking With Rob Monster From Epik

Rob Monster From Epik and PPC Ian

At SMX Advanced 2010, I flew in late Monday night. This was a bit difficult because the conference starts early Tuesday morning. This year, I took a different approach and flew in mid-day on Monday. This gave me some time to really enjoy Seattle and get in some extra networking.

I put my extra day to use by scheduling a meeting with my friend Rob Monster, CEO of Epik. I’ve blogged quite a bit about Epik here on PPC Ian and am a huge fan. I own a ton of Epik sites (currently 55) and highly recommend checking out my Epik Product Portal Tips.

Rob and I had drinks at the Edgewater Hotel, the official hotel of the conference. It was truly great catching up with Rob as he’s big time serial entrepreneur, investor/venture capitalist, and one of the most successful professionals around. It truly pays to have mentors and friends like Rob!

An Amazing Whirlwind First Day At SMX Advanced

PPC Ian and Craig Danuloff (ClickEquations)

On Tuesday, I had a truly great day at SMX Advanced. I had one of those whirlwind days where the day is packed from 8:00 am through 11:00 pm at night! My day started off going to the sessions at SMX Advanced. I must say that the first session about pay per click quality score was the best session of the entire conference.

My favorite part of the session: My friend Craig Danuloff (CEO of ClickEquations provided a multitude of insights about quality score and announced his brand new quality score book (which I purchased and plan to review here soon). Craig is the leading expert in our industry about Google’s quality score algorithm and it’s always an honor to hear him speak. While I was at the ClickEquations booth, I also caught up with my friend Alex Cohen. Alex also spoke at SMX and is truly impressive. I highly recommend his blog, Digital Alex.

Geoff Shenk, David Rodnitzky, and PPC Ian

As the day progressed, I really enjoyed walking around the expo hall (twice as many exhibits as last year) and eating the great food and snacks that SMX provided (they went all out and I feel like I ate way too much, but it’s all good). While walking around SMX, it seemed like I was always running into people I knew! Truly cool stuff! In my opinion, the biggest value of these conferences is the networking. My advice to you: Go all out and network with as many online marketers as possible. It’s amazing the connections you will build.

Right around lunch time, for example, I ran into my friends Geoff Shenk (Managing Director at Kenshoo) and David Rodnitzky (CEO of PPC Associates). Kenshoo is an amazing online marketing platform that I highly recommend. I recently blogged about their new Watchdog product. I’m friends with a lot of people at Kenshoo and they truly have an amazing company. PPC Associates is one of the hottest paid search agencies in the Bay Area.

PPC Ian and My Marin Software Friends

While walking around the expo hall, I of course ran into my good friends Michael Cook and Jana Fung from Marin Software. I’m a huge fan of Marin Software and have blogged quite a bit about their SEM platform and whitepapers. One of my favorites: Marin’s Free Guide To Facebook Ads.

Later in the day, I also ran into my friend Matt Lawson, Marin’s VP of Marketing. Matt’s a real visible guy, I’m always running into him at all these conferences and he truly does a great job representing Marin Software. Marin is located in San Francisco so I enjoy having lunch with Matt from time to time.

PPC Ian and John Rampton From TechieMania

Here’s where it starts getting really crazy! Out of the blue, I ran into John Rampton from TechieMania. I have never met John in person before but he’s a regular commentator here on PPC Ian and I truly appreciate his contribution to the comments here. John came up to me in the expo hall and recognized me from my blog! That was a real milestone for me, my blog is starting to get truly noticed thanks to all of you! It was great hanging out with John and I highly recommend checking out his blog. John is a great guy and I hope to network with him more in the future.

Later in the day, I attended more exciting sessions while diligently taking notes. Overall, I felt the SEO content from SMX was stronger than the PPC content. Don’t get me wrong, the PPC content was great. It’s just that the SEO content was unparalleled. The SEO track pulled out all stops. At the end of day one, I really enjoyed watching the You&A session with Danny Sullivan and Matt Cutts. There’s always some great comedy in this session and I truly enjoyed it!

PPC Ian and Chris Guthrie (Make Money on the Internet)

At the end of the sessions, I headed over to the expo hall floor for the Expo Hall Reception sponsored by Yahoo! and Bing. It’s there that I met up with my good friend Chris Guthrie from Make Money on the Internet. Chris is an inspiration to me. He’s a big time blogger and affiliate marketer. He makes a ton of money online and works really hard to deliver value. That said, he stays humble. He’s got the best attitude around and truly enjoys helping others. I was really hoping that I’d be able to catch up with Chris at SMX Advanced like I did last year and was really happy we were able to connect two years in a row!

Awesome Dinner With Friends, Talk About Great Times

While I was hanging out with Chris Guthrie and enjoying some free drinks thanks to Yahoo! and Bing, we met up with a variety of great people including Nathaniel Broughton from Growth Partner (Nathaniel is a big time affiliate marketer, entrepreneur, and leader), Sujan Patel from Single Grain (Sujan owns an SEO agency right here in San Francisco), and Max Wellenstein and Steve Kroll from RocketClicks (these guys are truly inspirational and make an amazing name for RocketClicks). I had such a blast networking and making new friends. I learned that Sujan’s office is just down the street from mine in San Francisco and we already have lunch on the books next week. Talk about great networking and building my network with high impact professionals. We were all having so much fun at the expo hall that we decided to head out to dinner. You can see a picture to the right of us all enjoying dinner!

We really enjoyed dinner in Seattle because it stays light so late in the summer! The long days are really neat. After dinner, which ended around 10:00 pm, I caught up with my great friend from Stanford who happened to be in Seattle for Microsoft conference. We had drinks and enjoyed catching up. Like I mentioned, a true whirlwind day and a true blast!

SMX Advanced Seattle Day 2, My Time To Chill Out

Richard Couture, PPC Ian, and Marc Poirier

Day one of SMX Advanced Seattle was amazing, but was also a bit tiring. So, I decided to take it a bit easier on day two. My day started off with a 7:30 am breakfast at the Edgewater Hotel. I truly enjoyed meeting and networking with the CFO of a local Seattle startup. After that, I checked out of my hotel and headed over to the conference. Just like day one, I enjoyed the sessions, networking with new and old friends, and eating some great food and snacks.

I had a ton of fun in particular catching up with my friend Marc Poirier CMO and co-founder of Acquisio. Acquisio is an amazing performance marketing platform for agencies. I have blogged quite a bit about Acquisio here on PPC Ian and recommend checking out their free Facebook Webinar. I learned a lot by watching this webinar. Marc is a truly impressive professional and one of the nicest people at the conference, I always enjoy catching up with him. I also enjoyed meeting Richard Couture, Acquisio’s co-founder and VP of Product Management.

I ended up leaving the conference a little bit early and flying back to San Francisco in the early evening. Next year, I’m thinking of staying another day so I can take in the parties and festivities at the end of the conference on Wednesday night. Seattle is such an amazing city and I want to take this opportunity to give a shout out to Danny Sullivan and the entire SMX team. You guys did a great job with this conference! Everyone who I networked with at SMX, it was really great meeting up with you guys! Please stay in touch.

More Amazing Pictures From SMX Advanced 2011

SMX Advanced Seattle 2011

SMX Advanced Seattle Edgewater Hotel

SMX Advanced Seattle Convention Center

SMX Advanced Seattle Marc Poirier

SMX Advanced Seattle Skyline

All images in this post © PPCIan.com

Posted in: Conferences | Tags: smx, smx advanced | Comments: 12 comments so far, join the discussion!

SMX West 2011 Search Conference Rocked

Posted by: Ian Comments: 10 comments so far

Mar. 09

It’s very apparent based on my wonderful experience at SMX West 2011 today that the search marketing industry is absolutely on fire. There is no time like the present, the SEM career path is the best career path in my opinion. Today, I’m looking forward to sharing with you some of my favorite SMX West 2011 conference highlights!

SMX West Had Some Great Advanced Content

PPC Ian, Marc Poirier, and the Amazing Acquisio Team

SMX West has historically been more of an introductory conference, one geared towards those newer to digital advertising. I consistently attend each year because it’s in San Jose, just a short half hour drive from my job. By contrast, SMX Advanced has been more advanced (as the name implies).

This year, however, I was pleasantly surprised. SMX West 2011 totally delivered and included great content both for beginners and seasoned industry veterans like myself. I was definitely at the edge of my seat, taking diligent notes! In terms of advanced content, it was especially exciting hearing all about Microsoft’s adCenter quality score algorithm directly from Microsoft product managers. Moreover, I was totally floored when a panelist on the Google AdWords Extensions seminar predicted that Google will be launching sitelinks on an adgroup level (they’re currently set on a campaign level). In my opinion, this would be a tremendous opportunity to fine tune ad copy to the next level, now that sitelinks are showing up on many generic queries.

PPC Ian and My Great Friends From Kenshoo

A few other exciting topics from SMX:

I learned all about Google product feeds. I used to be in retail back in 2004-2006 when I managed SEM at comparison shopping giant NexTag. Since then, however, I’ve been in services-oriented verticals. A lot has changed over the years and it was really great to pick up some product feed insights.
Efficient Frontier presented some truly amazing industry trends. Basically, they compiled data across all their clients and reported it on an aggregate level. An incredibly important part of our jobs as SEM professionals is answering questions about macro industry trends. Efficient Frontier helped me out quite a bit with their data points.

SMX Is Great For Networking

PPC Ian and My Great Friends From Marin Software

What’s my favorite part of search conferences? It really comes down to networking. Whether it’s catching up with old friends or making new friends, conferences like SMX West are ideal for networking. When it comes to your long term career within search engine marketing, a strong network is everything. It’s because of my strong network that I’ve made it this far in the world of SEM and I continue to invest in relationships each and every day.

As you can see throughout this post, I had the great opportunity to catch up with my close friends from Acquisio, Kenshoo, and Marin Software. If you’ve been reading PPC Ian for a while, you’ll know that I’m totally obsessed with SEM automation. Acquisio, Kenshoo, and Marin Software are three of the absolute top leaders when it comes to search marketing software, and I’ve been incredibly fortunate to establish close relationships with all of them. It was really great catching up with my friends!

I had a real blast chatting with Marc Poirier, Co-Founder and CMO of Acquisio. I had the opportunity to chat with Marc at length about my personal career trajectory and truly enjoyed it! Also, I scored two of those amazing Acquisio t-shirts (one for myself and one for my wife). I will be highlighting them in a future post. Side note: Make sure to check out my exclusive interview with Marc Poirier.

As you can see in the image on the right, Marin Software really went all out this year. They had, in my opinion, the most impressive booth at SMX West. It was truly great catching up with Matt Lawson, VP of Marketing at Marin Software. Side note: Make sure to check out my exclusive interview with Matt Lawson. Making their booth even more enticing, they had an Xbox giveaway!

Last, I had an amazing experience chatting with Geoff Shenk, Managing Director of Kenshoo North America. Kenshoo has a new product called Watchdog that’s truly amazing and I’ll be blogging about it soon! While I don’t have a interview directly with Geoff here on PPC Ian, I recently interviewed Chad Baldwin – Kenshoo’s VP of Sales.

This Year, I Just Went To The First Day

SMX West 2011

This year, I decided to just attend day one of SMX West. Why? I’m in a leadership position and it’s my responsibility to balance conferences with my day-to-day responsibilities. As such, I decided to share the excitement and am having my team cover for me the rest of this conference. This will be a tremendous experience for my team, and I’m truly excited that I got an opportunity to enjoy day one of SMX West while still leaving myself time to get my important projects done! Did you attend SMX West this year? I’d love to hear your thoughts!

Posted in: Conferences | Tags: smx, smx west | Comments: 10 comments so far, join the discussion!

SMX Advanced Seattle 2010 Rocked

Posted by: Ian Comments: 14 comments so far

Jun. 11

I attended SMX Advanced Seattle this week and had an awesome time. I really enjoyed the venue and met up with a lot of old and new friends. I even learned a few new tips and tricks from the esteemed group of presenters. In short, this was a superb conference. Today, I’m going to discuss my personal experience!

SMX Advanced Overview

Bing Team

I’m a big fan of online marketing conferences. Back in January, I thoroughly enjoyed the domaining conference TRAFFIC. More recently, I attended SMX West Santa Clara (but didn’t blog about it). The next conference on my list is SES San Francisco, coming in August. Search marketing conferences are a great place to network, learn, and stay in tune with a quickly evolving industry. It’s very easy to get stuck behind your computer and work long hours, losing sight of the bigger industry. My advice to you: Get yourself and your team out of the office and attend a few conferences!

This year, SMX (Search Marketing Expo) Advanced was held at Bell Harbor Conference Center in Seattle. You can see a few pictures of the venue at the end of this post. I must say that I thoroughly enjoyed beautiful Seattle. I stayed at the convenient Edgewater Hotel right next to the conference center, the official hotel of the conference. I enjoy getting my sleep so the convenience of the hotel to the conference was a true gift.

For those of you newer to the industry, SMX conferences are organized by industry guru Danny Sullivan. Danny owns Third Door Media which publishes the world famous Search Engine Land. I always enjoy SMX conferences and this one took it to the next level, in my opinion. Why, you ask? Simple: I walked away empowered with a few new tips and tricks. As someone who’s been a PPC pro for over six years, it’s sometimes hard to find new, interesting ideas! I personally attended all of the sessions on the PPC track and enjoyed all of them.

SMX Advanced Was Great For Networking

Before we even get into my experience in the sessions, I have to highlight the awesome networking opportunities that SMX Advanced provided. I’m a huge fan of the Yahoo-Microsoft Search Alliance. It’s one of the most exciting events in our industry since the Yahoo Panama transition several years ago. As such, I definitely wanted to spend some time with the Bing and Yahoo teams. You can see some photos of me with my friends from Bing and Yahoo above and below.

Second to the end below, you can see me hanging out with my friends from Kenshoo. As you may know, I’m a huge fan of SEM automation. Kenshoo is one of the premier SEM tools out there. The team is amazing (I have known these guys for a few years now) and they are growing rapidly. Their success makes perfect sense to me, the tool is awesome! Stay tuned, I will be interviewing Kenshoo in a future PPC Ian post.

Not pictured in this post, I got to connect with several old reports and co-workers. It’s a small industry and always great to see old friends. Also, I got to meet up with some of my newer friends. I enjoyed meeting Chris Guthrie from Make Money On The Internet and also Matt, Josh, and Nate from Unique Blog Designs. Unique Blog Designs designed and built PPC Ian! I worked extensively with them over the phone and email, and now I finally got to meet them. Good times for sure!

A Few Cool Takeaways From SMX Advanced

I took pages and pages of notes at SMX Advanced. Throughout the conference, I enjoyed emailing tips and tricks back to my team. I’ve been in the industry for over six years so it’s not often that I walk away from a conference with action items. SMX Advanced was different, however, and I now have a few new strategies to try. The presentations were great from the standpoint of sparking new ideas while also helping me re-engage old ideas that I had but filed away. I’d like to highlight just a few fun takeaways from the event:

Craig Danuloff, Founder and President of ClickEquations gave an excellent presentation on Google AdWords quality score. I walked away with an awesome white paper and a few new quality score tests. In particular, Craig piqued my interest with his hypothesis that display URLs with fake subdomains and folders (to improve CTR) are considered different from the root URL for quality score history purposes.
Wister Walcott from Marin Software proved that conversion rate does not vary by position! There has been an ongoing debate in our industry about this topic forever. It was great to see Wister independently prove this concept, further validating the findings of Google’s chief economist Hal Varian (I recently heard Hal speak on this topic at Google’s Think Finance event). As you know from my recent Marin Software Interview, I’m a tremendous fan of this amazing SEM technology company and give them my top recommendation.
Siddharth Shah, PhD from Efficient Frontier discussed portfolio theory versus profit maximization bidding models and how one may leverage the concepts of portfolio theory even with an unlimited budget. I really enjoyed his talk and walked away with an awesome white paper as well!
Several awesome presentations on mobile PPC. Mobile is going to be huge in coming years and now is the time to start testing. Of particular interest, I enjoyed learning that shorter queries perform better in mobile and that catchy abbreviations such as "4" (instead of "for") and "ur" (instead of "your") are accepted by Google. I feel empowered to start some mobile tests.
The idea of microconversions was covered several times. I’m a big direct response guy. However, when you’re building out awareness, branding, and social media efforts, it’s not always practical to look at the entire funnel. However, one should assign a dollar value to microconversions such as number of Twitter followers, white paper downloads, and Facebook fans. An old concept that I’ve been thinking about for a long time, but great to put it in font of me again and remind me to take action!

Couldn’t attend SMX Advanced this year? Don’t worry! SMX conferences are frequent and SMX Paris and SMX East are just around the corner. One thing is for sure: I will be attending SMX Advanced again next year! I will tell you, there was one huge downside to this conference… My two hour flight home turned into a six hour flight home. High winds in San Francisco forced my small United plane to turn around and land in Sacramento (lack of fuel to circle and wait for landing clearance). After waiting a long time on the Sacramento runway, we finally took off again for SF. The second time around, we had to circle like crazy until we finally landed. Upon landing, there really were some seriously high winds so I do appreciate that United put safety first and didn’t rush the landing.