Fun Times At SMX West San Jose 2013

If you’re in the online marketing industry, you should definitely attend SMX. Today, I attended SMX West San Jose 2013. I’m thrilled to recap my fun times at the event and share some pictures of PPC Ian with friends from the online marketing industry. (After reading today’s post, you may also wish to check out my 2012 and 2011 recaps.) There are two more days left in SMX West 2013 so you should definitely try to make it if you are in the SF Bay Area!

It’s All About The People

PPC Ian and Hillary Read From PPC Associates

SMX is all about the people. I primarily attend these conferences for networking and today’s conference totally delivered. In fact, as soon as I stepped out of my car in the convention center parking lot, I ran into my friend Snejana Norris. We used to work together at QuinStreet, and now Snejana is Senior Manager, Marketing at LendingTree. What a funny coincidence that we both arrived to SMX West at the same time!

Upon first arriving, the conference seemed a little quiet. There were not a ton of attendees. This surprised me since online advertising is a huge industry and we’re in the online marketing capital of the world, the SF Bay Area! However, I also know just how busy I am right now – so much that I could only spend a partial day at SMX West this year. Perhaps other online marketing professionals are hard at work, too busy to pause for the conference. Despite the quiet feel, the conference was amazing. Those who did attend, speak, and support the conference are top quality online marketers.

SMX West Delivered Great Insights

PPC Ian and Neil Lunagaria From Marin Software

As soon as I arrived at the conference, I went to the paid search track. I was totally impressed. This year, SMX West over-delivered on content. In fact, the paid search track felt almost like SMX Advanced. The quality of the presentations, the insightful tips, and the level of engagement as very exciting. I have been in this industry since 2004 and I still learned a few new insights from the presentations. Nice work, panelists! My favorite session? The remarketing one for sure.

After the first session, I went to grab some refreshments and ran into my friend Eli Schwartz. We used to work together at QuinStreet and now Eli is Online Marketing Manager at SurveyMonkey. What a small world!

After refreshments, I went back to the paid search track. I sat down on the aisle, noticing that someone’s stuff was already on the seat next to me. After a few minutes, none other than Hillary Read sat down next to me. What an awesome coincidence! Hillary is Marketing Manager at PPC Associates SEM Agency. If you have been reading PPC Ian for a while, you know that PPC Associates is a true friend of my blog. In fact, I have a guest post that will be going live on the PPC Associates blog soon (I’ll let you know when it’s live so you can check it out).

Upon completion of a solid morning of networking and absorbing online marketing knowledge, it was time for lunch. Mike (from my team) and I went to Arcadia Restaurant. Arcadia is on the ground floor of the Marriott hotel and is awesome. Arcadia is a tradition for Mike and I, and this was our third year enjoying the burgers there. I highly recommend it – the food is delicious, especially the angus burger.

Google DoubleClick Search Booth – A Conference Highlight

After lunch, I went to the expo hall. I especially enjoyed connecting with my good friends from Marin Software. Their booth was front and center. I enjoyed learning more about Marin’s social platform from Neil Lunagaria, Director of Social Platform. I also thoroughly enjoyed the DoubleClick Search booth (check out the picture below). Google went big this year demoing their new DoubleClick Search platform and I must say I’m impressed. My favorite feature: DoubleClick Search offers intra-day bidding, updating bids 4x per day on both Google AdWords and Bing Ads. Nice work!

It’s at this time that I decided to head back to the office to get some work done. While I only got to spend a partial day at SMX West, I truly enjoyed my time. Also, I am thrilled to know my team will be attending the rest of the week and reporting back on their discoveries. I hope to see you at a future SMX conference!

Images from SMX West 2013 © PPCIan.com

SMX Advanced 2012 Pictures and Recap

By PPC Ian Leave a Comment Jun 8 5

Today, I’m excited to share a ton of pictures from SMX Advanced 2012. This great conference, hosted in Seattle, covers all sorts of advanced PPC and SEO topics. 2012 marks my third year at this search marketing conference, you can read my 2011 recap here and my 2010 recap here. Each year, I try to take more pictures and I think I accomplished just that with 14 in this year’s post! I hope you enjoy the recap and pictures…

Day 0: The Day Before The Conference

Ian, Nicole, and Andrew at Six Seven Restaurant

This year was the best yet because I attended the conference with my amazing wife, Nicole, and my teammate, Andrew. All three of us flew from San Francisco to Seattle mid-day on Monday. We took Virgin airlines, and it was quite a pleasant flight. I had never flown Virgin America before, and am really happy with the experience, I definitely plan on flying Virgin again.

Once we arrived in Seattle, we took a taxi over to our hotel, The Edgewater. The Edgewater is a really great hotel, and it’s the third year in a row I stayed there. Each time it’s so much fun, I really love this place! I especially enjoyed this year because Nicole and I had a room on the water side of the hotel (as opposed to the city view side) with a really cool balcony and nice water view. All the way at the end of this post, you can see a view of a sailboat going by from our balcony. After checking in, the three of us were so hungry so we headed over to restaurant Six Seven at the Edgewater. The food there is great and the atmosphere too. Each year, I always have to eat at Six Seven at least once. You can see a picture of Nicole, Andrew and I enjoying lunch to the right.

PPC Ian, Andrew, and Kenshoo - Geoff, Chad, and Claudia

By the time we had enjoyed a late lunch, it was time to head on over to the SMX Meet and Greet. It was totally packed there. Check out the picture all the way towards the end of this post (the first under the “More Pictures” section). As soon as I got into the Meet and Greet, I ran into the Kenshoo leadership crew – Geoff, Chad, and Claudia. I got a great picture with them to the right. It’s really funny because I got a similar picture way back in my 2010 SMX Advanced Post. I think we all aged quite well over the last two years, we all look the same!

PPC Ian and March Poirier from Acquisio

After chatting with Kenshoo and complementing Geoff on his amazing social media skills (make sure to follow @geoffshenk on Twitter), I bumped into my good friend Marc Poirier from Acquisio. (Later in the conference, I heard Marc speak about Retargeting, one of my favorite sessions in the entire conference.) After about an hour of networking, we were getting hungry again and decided to leave the Meet and Greet and find some dinner.

After searching restaurants not too far from the conference, we decided to go to Serious Pie. This place was amazing. There’s a reason it has four stars and 1,200+ reviews on Yelp – the food is so good (and not too expensive either). (There’s a picture of Serious Pie in the “More Pictures” section at the end of this post.) After Serious Pie, it was time to head back to The Edgewater, catch up on work, and then finally get some sleep! Search conferences are so much fun, but can be very tiring too. My advice: Make sure to pace yourself and get as much sleep as possible.

Day 1: An Action-Packed Day of SMX Advanced

PPC Ian and My Marin Software Friends

Before the Meet and Greet, I had picked up my SMX badge so the next morning I was able to get there right around 8:30, walk in and grab some breakfast, and then head into the SMX Advanced sessions. Day 1 was an awesome day – the sessions were great, the lunch was really good (SMX Advanced has much better food than other search marketing conferences), and I got to network like crazy at the expo hall. In terms of sessions, here are the ones I attended on the first day:

The Periodic Table of SEO – 2012 Edition
Perfecting Your PPC Landing Pages
Getting The Most Out of Retargeting From The Pros
Breaking The Speed Limit: Fast Sites Win!
You&A With Matt Cutts

How do [you] Kenshoo? PPC Ian and Chris Cohen

All of the sessions were good. I especially enjoyed the retargeting one because I got to hear my good friend Marc Poirier speak. He brought in great data from his own Acquisio retargeting experiments. Want to learn ore about retargeting? I highly recommend checking out Acquisio’s Retargeting eBook. I also enjoyed exposing myself to SEO sessions. While I’m PPC (pay per click) Ian, I also thoroughly enjoy the SEO discipline too. SEO is so engineering-focused, and I’m a Stanford CS graduate, so this stuff is right up my alley.

During day 1, I also spent a lot of time networking in the expo hall. I’m a huge fan of networking and really enjoy people, especially the amazing people in our industry. You’ll see a lot of pictures throughout this post from the expo hall. It’s become PPC Ian tradition to grab pictures with all of my friends, new and old, with the signature “thumbs up”.

PPC Ian and Adobe Digital Marketing, Ian and Julia

One of the first booths I stopped at was Marin Software. Marin Software is an amazing SEM platform. I’m friends with a ton of employees there and really enjoyed catching up with my good friends Samantha Lee (in the picture above) and also Matt Lawson, Marin’s VP of Marketing. Marin always has an impressive and crowded booth.

After spending some time with Marin, I headed over to the Kenshoo booth. The night before, I had spent some quality time with Geoff, Chad, and Claudia. On day 1, I ran into one of my other Kenshoo friend, Chris Cohen. you can see a picture of Chris and I above. I had a ton of fun with this picture because it was part of Kenshoo’s “How do [you] Kenshoo” campaign. That’s some really solid marketing, and I’m a huge fan of this amazing SEM software platform.

PPC Ian with The BrightEdge Marketing Team

Next, I found the Adobe booth. Adobe offers an amazing suite of online marketing platforms such as Efficient Frontier and Omniture. Adobe has been on a real great trajectory and has developed one of the leading offerings in our industry. At the Adobe booth, I got to meet Julia Soffa (check out the picture above). (Side note: I’m a huge fan of Adobe’s New Whitepaper.)

I’m so excited and proud: Nicole is now Product Marketing Manager at BrightEdge. This is a really exciting role. You may recall, I blogged about BrightEdge back in my SMX West 2012 Post. What is BrightEdge? It’s the leading platform for enterprise SEO. If you are responsible for managing SEO at a company, BrightEdge is the must-have platform. They are going places and growing at warp speed. Above, you can see a picture of me and the BrightEdge marketing team. To the right is a picture of my amazing wife, Nicole, at the BrightEdge booth. BrightEdge was a Gold Sponsor of the conference.

My Wife, Nicole, Product Marketing Manager at BrightEdge

After having a great time at the BrightEdge booth, it was time to hang out at the SEO Moz booth. I just had to grab a photo with the SEO Moz Bot. Later, I attended You&A With Matt Cutts, one of the highlights of the day! After an exciting day of sessions and networking, I enjoyed the Expo Hall Reception for a bit and then went back to my hotel room to rest for about 1/2 hour.

Then, it was time to head on over to The Purple Cafe for the Marin Software dinner. Marin Software really went all out on this dinner. They invited a lot of clients, both old and new, and treated us all to one of the best meals I have had in my life. The food was so amazing. The company was amazing too. Thank you so much, Marin, for treating us to this dinner, you rule! By the time dinner was over, we were close to 12:00 am. I went back to my hotel room. Nicole was still out at the BrightEdge dinner. I heard amazing things about their dinner too and know that BrightEdge employees and clients had an amazing time. Overall, day 1 of SMX Advanced Seattle 2012 was one of the best conference experiences ever!

Day Two: The Last Day of SMX Advanced 2012

PPC Ian and SEO Moz Bot

I had so much fun on day 1, that I felt a bit tired on day 2. As such, day 2 was a little slower paced but still super fun. It all started out with sessions. On day 2, I attended these ones:

Keynote with Bing’s Derrick Connell
Schema & Authorship: 1 Year Later
Pagination & Canonicalization For The Pros
Landing Pages & Conversion In A Smartphone & Tablet World

I really enjoyed all of the sessions, especially the SEO one on Schema & Authorship. The speakers in this sessions were really knowledgeable and provided a wealth of information and tools to help any SEO enterprise take their business to the next level. I really enjoyed the mobile landing page sessions too. The future is mobile and landing page strategy is especially important to mobile. Carlos del Rio from Unbounce did a great job presenting and I’m glad I got to meet him in-person at the Marin Software booth the day before. (Also, I enjoyed the landing page session from day 1. At that session, Carlos also spoke, in addition to Scott Brinker from ION Interactive.)

Marin Software Dinner The Purple Cafe

Of course, I also spent some great time networking on day 2 as well. I especially enjoyed running into my pal David Rodnitzky from PPC Associates. David is a leader in our industry and runs Silicon Valley’s SEM Agency. It’s always fun running into David.

At the end of day 2, Nicole, Andrew, and I took a towncar back to the airport. If you stay at The Edgewater, they can book you a towncar the night before for only $45, a real deal (considering a taxi would have cost a similar price). This is a super tip if you attend the conference in future years.

PPC Ian and David Rodnitzky

We rushed to the airport for nothing since our flight was delayed (airspace was restricted in San Francisco due to President Obama visiting), but we enjoyed all that the SeaTac airport has to offer. The flight back was full of SMX Advanced folks since San Francisco is such a hub for online marketing. I got back totally exhausted, but super happy that the conference was such a success.

I’m looking forward to future SMX Conferences and thank Search Engine Land, Danny Sullivan, and SMX for putting on such an amazing conference. Until next time, SMX friends!

More Pictures From SMX Advanced Seattle 2012

SMX Advanced Seattle 2012 Opening Ceremony

Serious Pie Seattle

SMX Seattle The Edgewater Hotel

All images in this post © PPCIan.com

My SMX West San Jose 2012 Pictures & Recap

By PPC Ian Leave a Comment Feb 29 14

Some of my absolute favorite posts here on PPC Ian are the ones about search engine marketing conferences. Yesterday, I attended SMX West San Jose 2012 and the conference absolutely rocked! As always, my favorite part about the entire conference was the networking and fun times with friends, both new and old. Today, I’m thrilled to share tons of pictures and a recap of SMX (Search Marketing Expo) West 2012.

It All Started Off With Great Sessions & Great Lunch

Lunch With Rocket Clicks SEM Agency

I arrived at the conference early yesterday. Since my team shared our all access pass, I attended sessions the morning of day 1. I picked two really great ones. It all started off with Hardcore Local SEO Tactics and then I headed over to Best Practices With adCenter For Bing.

Both sessions were great, but the first one, the local SEO tactics, really opened my eyes. I’m an enterprise level advertiser for large online brands. Sure I leverage geo-specific strategies to the max, but I’ve never promoted physical local storefronts before via SEO. The level of insight from the local marketers was really helpful and totally made my day.

PPC Ian, Jeff Ferguson, and Marin Software

Also, I enjoyed the adCenter session too but I’m already an expert with the adCenter Desktop Tool so it was more of a review for me. As far as sessions go, my teammate Mike went to the Power Tools For The Paid Search Pros later in the day and said it was really great. My good friend David Rodnitzky, CEO of PPC Associates spoke at that one!

After these great sessions, I was ready for a great lunch… Back at SMX Advanced Seattle 2011, I met Steve Kroll, Director of Operations at Rocket Clicks SEM Agency. Steve is a true leader in our industry and has become a great friend. I got a text message from Steve right before SMX West saying he wouldn’t be there but two of his colleagues would.

I really enjoyed meeting Nicole Mennicke, Director of PPC, and Liz Lord, Senior Paid Search Analyst, from Rocket Clicks. Nicole and Liz kindly treated myself and my teammate Mike to lunch at Arcadia Steak House. (It’s funny, Mike and I had lunch last year at that same place. It’s really great food.) We had an amazing lunch, chatted and PPC strategies, and I’m totally impressed with Rocket Clicks. If you’re looking for an SEM agency, you definitely want to reach out to my friends at Rocket Clicks.

Let The Expo Hall Networking Begin

PPC Ian and My Friends At Acquisio

After lunch, I was fired up and ready to network. So, I headed over to the expo hall at SMX West. Surprisingly, it was a lot smaller than previous years. There were some truly great exhibits there, but it just felt small.

As soon as I walked in, I ran into my good friends from Marin Software. There booth was front and center, right near the entrance. I always enjoy meeting up with Marin because they are so impressive. I have a ton of friends there, absolutely love their SEM Platform (it’s amazing), and enjoy hearing about their rapid growth. While speaking with Matt Lawson and his team, I also met Jeff Ferguson, CEO and founder of Fang Digital. Jeff is one of the most seasoned online marketers around, he’s been doing this stuff since the mid 90s.

After spending time with my friends at the Marin booth, I headed over to Acquisio. I was totally blown away! Acquisio has a brand new booth that is out of this world. Each year, the booths keep getting more and more impressive. Acquisio’s booth was one of the best I have seen. Recently, Acquisio Acquired ClickEquations and they are on a roll!

PPC Ian With BrightEdge

Next, I started walking around the expo hall and found a company called BrightEdge. I really enjoyed chatting with Brad Mattick, VP of Marketing, and Mark Melnyk, Talent Acquisition at BrightEdge. BrightEdge is a rapidly growing SEO platform for enterprise advertisers. I’m totally going to check it out and am quite intrigued by the platform. After all, I’m the greatest proponent of SEM automation platforms around (such as Kenshoo). I can’t get enough of these cool technologies!

Next on the expo floor was BoostCTR. As the name implies, this service/platform helps you boost the CTR (click through rate) and also conversion rate of your PPC campaigns. It was really great to learn that BoostCTR has offices right near mine in San Francisco and I’ll be reaching out to schedule a lunch and demo shortly.

While the expo hall floor was a bit small, I was impressed with the quality of companies there. I’m thrilled I learned of two new companies (BrightEdge and BoostCTR) that will help me directly improve my online marketing programs.

Time To Rest & Then Go To The Sharks Game

PPC Ian and BoostCTR

After the amazing times at the SMX West expo floor, I headed over to the coffee shop at the Marriott. I enjoyed spending some time there relaxing and getting some work done. It’s there that I actually published my blog post about 5 Tips For SEM Conferences. I love working at coffee shops and I’m always inspired in that type of environment. I need to remind myself to work at Starbucks and over coffee shops more frequently, it’s all about being productive in an environment you like.

After relaxing and working for a bit, I joined my friends from Marin Software for the San Jose Sharks game. Marin, I can’t thank you guys enough for treating me to the amazing game! We had such great seats at the Sharks game (check out the picture below). It was actually my first San Jose Sharks game, and I definitely want to go again. It was a real blast. The food at the HP Pavilion was really good too. So, there you have it! My SMX West 2012. I did not attend days 2 and 3. After taking in so much on day 1, my team went to the conference on days 2 and 3. We always take diligent notes and share our findings after the conference so I can’t wait to hear what my team learned. I can’t wait until my next SEM conference!

More Pictures From SMX West 2012

SMX West San Jose Sharks Game

SMX West Expo Hall

Images in this post © PPCIan.com

My SMX Advanced 2011 Pictures and Recap

By PPC Ian Leave a Comment Jun 9 14

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)!

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

SMX West 2011 Search Conference Rocked

By PPC Ian Leave a Comment Mar 9 10

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!

SMX Advanced Seattle 2010 Rocked

By PPC Ian Leave a Comment Jun 11 14

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.

Some Photos From SMX Advanced Seattle