SearchFest 2015: Favorite Strategies & Notes
This year’s SEMPDX SearchFest was another hit! Speakers from all around the world brought the latest search marketing strategies to in-house and agency digital marketing professionals in Portland.
We had a wonderful keynote from Tim Mayer, the CMO at Trueffect and Heddle Marketing, well known for his early work at Overture, Yahoo! and FAST.
Tim’s keynote discussed some of the trends that companies are seeing in the digital space. One that really stood out to us was that Cisco thinks that by 2017 individuals will be on 5 devices. This means that the exponential need for device IDs and cross-device understanding will accelerate fast!
Facebook’s data shows that 35% of people that click on an ad in facebook will end up converting on a different device. This makes a lot of sense and it means that a large amount of sales and lead attribution data is being mixed across multiple channels and devices.
Larry Kim from Wordstream had a packed presentation will all kinds of data that his company sees as relevant for improving conversions and reducing cost in Paid Search campaigns.
We really like these Strategy notes:
- Impression share is 2x more important on mobile.
- Cost per conversion is discounted by 16% each point.
- Low QualityScore = huge tax (CPC +400%)
- Best CTR Keywords – Highly commercial in nature keywords – where the intent is to transact.
- DKI – Dynamic Keyword Insertion – improves to the top 15%.
- For social advertising to work, you need interesting content and the right people to see that content.
- Google’s Display Network: 67.5% of display ads are actually plain text ads that will be shown as display ads.
- Improve conversion rates by performing Path Through Site Conversion Analysis – create ads that match the pages where people end up at, and cut the number of pages needed to navigated through to become a conversion.
- In Facebook – Make ads look more like content blocks.
- In Google Adwords there are 14 ad formats. – the best CTR formats are: Leaderboard, Inline rectangle, banner, wide sky.
Finally, Gmail Promotions work really well!
They show up at the top of inbox. Looks like an email but it’s not. CTR is 5x higher than on the right side of a Gmail page. This strategy gives you the ability to target based on who people are receiving emails from, including competitors or related businesses.