Search Engine Strategies returned to London last week, but in a new location – the Queen Elizabeth II Conference Centre – just a stone’s throw from iconic attractions such as Westminster Abbey and the Houses of Parliament. But was the content inside as impressive as the views outside?
I spoke on two panels. The first, on Tuesday, was called ‘PPC or SEO? The Ultimate Search Marketing Battle’ and was a fun, knockabout session to pit the worth of PPC against SEO. I waved the flag for PPC while SEO was ably defended by Dave Naylor of Bronco. Bill Hunt of Back Azimuth Consulting gave insights on the interaction between the SEO and PPC while the session was moderated by Jon Myers of Yahoo!
Beyond the verbal sparring between Dave and I, what is clear of course is the value of understanding the interactions between different media channels, including SEO and PPC. A continued focus for Efficient Frontier in 2011 will be the development of tracking and optimization algorithms to help our customers understand and maximize these critical cross-channel interactions.
The second panel, on Wednesday, was called ‘Ads in a Quality Score World’. Chaired by Brad Geddes of CertifiedKnowledge, we took a deep dive into the Quality Score and best practice to improve it. Paul Mead of VCCP Search gave an excellent introduction into the theory and practice of how Quality Score works together with case studies.
Then I presented on how to deliver great Quality Scores at scale across large, enterprise search campaigns. Crafting each adgroup by hand is not an option when you have 150,000 adgroups and 1.3 million keywords, which was the example I used from one of our UK travel advertisers. The key is to use best practice with the right structures and templates, from which high quality campaigns can be built quickly out using advanced management tools such Efficient Frontier’s.
Overall, there seemed to be a new buzz about SES. Whether that was the new location or a renewed sense of optimism this year was unclear. But for advertisers, practitioners and technologists from all over Europe, this clearly was a valuable event to attend. I’m looking forward to the next one!
