I was traveling last week so I missed most of the show. One of the sessions in particular that I would have liked to seen was the Search Ad Buyers Forum. Stacy Williams has a great recap on SERoundtable posted yesterday. She says:
We’re bidding on “second hand as/400″ for a client who sells used mainframes, bidding $4.25 a click. The keyword is listed as “Active,”but when you roll over the magnifying glass to use the new Ad Diagnostic Tool, it’s not running because our “quality score and CPC are too low.” There is no way to know which keywords are inactive unless you roll over the magnifying glass for every keyword in your campaign.
I’ve run into this several times and can’t stress enough that you need to check the magnifying glass frequently within your campaigns to be sure your keyword is actually active.
Props to Stacy for using actual results in her presentation. It’s MUCH more interesting and useful to the attendees.
Anton Konikoff starts the session off with a couple jokes about being Russian and how no one will eat sushi with him anymore. I estimate from the crowd response that about 5% of the people understood the reference. I thought is was funny.
Mendez then comes back on (the guy with the charts) and shows some great tests performed for clients. While the client information was protected, you could clearly see how the tests were set up and what the results were. Good stuff.
Gord Hotchkiss closed with some cool eye tracking studies. Overriding message that I interpreted:
1. What people say they look at and what they really look at are 2 different things entirely.
2. People are absolutely looking at the top paid search results, as long as they are top left. Meaning, 1 or 2 in google, or 1-4 in Yahoo.
Good session overall.
This is the first session I went to yesterday. It was a packed house as this is obviously a hot button issue with online marketers. Overall impression: I was impressed with the people on the panel, they were articulate and presented well enough, but the information in the presentations wasn’t nearly granular enough. No one really provided any insight beyond what is already widely known.
The overriding message was “relevance”. And after the Yahoo party last night I don’t think I could particularly well explain how this relates to actual quality score calculations (it doesn’t, just look at ebay ads). Maybe Yahoo put something in my Yahoo-tini so that I would forget.
One guy in particular I do enjoy listening to is Jonathan Mendez from Otto Digital. He showed off some impressively designed mutlivariate testing. Or, I just like charts with real information in them, and he had lots of them.
