PPC-Advice.com

I was quite surprised to see such an overwhelming emphasis on web analytics, data, integration, and core business impact metrics such as return on investment and lifetime value of the client today. It’s somewhat unusual for much of the session talk to stray far from general search marketing, because as marketers we perhaps tend to gloss over the numbers in the name of branding efforts and long term investments in growth. Not so with SES Chicago! Not anymore! Read more…

Day two started right where Day one left off, with tons of more informative sessions.  Unfortunately, we only have two people from PPC-Advice.com covering the conference, which means we can only cover 2 of a possible 5 simultaneous tracks, hopefully next year we can get more people to come along.

Speaking of next year, the organizers of the show have already scheduled next year’s Silicon Valley show for outside of the valley, but within the bay Area.  Next year, SES will be coming from San Francisco, and no one could be happier about that than me.  Apparently, organizers, sponsors, speakers, and the engines themselves have all agreed – San Jose is hard to get to, has zero night-life, and is about the same distance from the major engine’s HQ’s in the valley.  Sweeeeeet. Read more…

In marketing, vendor and partner transparency is king; more transparency equals better client relations.  In the online marketing world, there’s the tendency for vendor relations to languish or stagnate by maintaining the status quo. After watching Google as an advertising vendor for many years, they simply aren’t that kind of company.  With the web being what it is today, clients and agencies that use Google Adwords are very vocal about improvements they’d like to see made, including the improvement of transparency.  Google’s new Search Based Keyword Tool is one such improvement: more better. Read more…

Continuing my pre-show coverage of Search Engine Strategies Toronto, I have the privilege of introducing Janice Hatch of Google Canada.  Janice is scheduled to speak on Day 2 of the conference in a session called “Campaign Performance Tracking” and was nice enough to spare some time to answer a few questions that relate to Google Adwords and the future of search marketing. Read more…

Attending the eMetrics conference this week in Toronto wasn’t necessarily a huge eye-opener for me, but several insightful discussions did arise from the show’s fundamentally significant panels and presentations.  One such topic included a sore spot for all online marketers and analysts at some point in their career: campaign attribution a.k.a. who gets the final credit for a conversion.

Who gets the credit?  Traditional Marketing?  Online advertising?  Last source of conversion?  Sales?  Or maybe customer service?  Who gets blamed for bad leads?  Someone’s gotta take the heat, right?

Read more…

It’s always a nice surprise when Google releases new tools and features for free products such as Google Analytics, because it shows that they’re committed to innovation, even in a time of economic uncertainty.  Today I received an automated e-mail from Mountain View informing me that one of the websites under my management was slotted for a new feature called Event Tracking. Read more…