The first session is getting underway. Great call from Barry to go with only Advanced Sessions this year.

1. WHY THE LONG TAIL STILL MATTERS.

Marty from Aimclear is the moderator. He is a hoot.

Speaker = Leigh Hanney

• There were 15.4bn searches in US last month.
• One-third of the queries are unique.
• So, is it extremely difficult to catch all these. Yes, if you use “exact” match.
• You need the right match type.  And broad + negative is not always the solution, because you can’t target the ad copy. So phrase + exact if you can.
• Need to target the tail (ie less common phrase), which is much cheaper.
• 10-30ish % of revenue can come from the tail.
• What revenue are you leaving on the table?

CATEGORIES OF KEYWORDS

• think information (how to, tips, DIY)
• navigational (brand)
• transactional (cheap discount)
• geo (state, city)
• professional (services)

Check out concatenation tool at www.thesempai.com or use Excel concatenation function.

Showing some of his own campaigns with 3% CTR, average position of  5, with 31% conversion (wow). Wonder what type of conversion it was?

Closing message. Don’t forget the tail.

2. ADVANCED CAMPAIGN SETTINGS

Speaker = Dennis Yu. Marty says he is a rock star. Dennis introduces himself. He used to run Yahoo paid search!

• Ecommerce – look at your days to conversions numbers, to see how long it’s taking for people to buy on your site. Check out “view through conversions”.
• Content network is a great place to target people before they are ready to buy, so don’t just look at hard conversions on the content network.
• People rarely convert on first touch (ie click).
• He recommends using Conversion Optimiser. You set your conversion cost per acqusition (CPA). You will go through a trough in the first week or 2. Then it will improve. You need 30 conversions per month.
• Conversion Optimiser can’t handle day parting (day parting is when you tell Google to run higher bids at certain times of the day/week).
• Don’t put your branding terms in Conversion Optimiser. As you want top position for them.
• Advert delivery method – set it to accelerated, not standard. If you run out, your budget’s wrong. If the keyword is converting, why are you going to let your budget run? (Hmm…easy in theory…)
• Mobile ads – make them their own campaigns (under “networks and devices”). People behave differently searching on phones.
• Sitelinks options are getting rolled out. You may not see it in your account yet. When you do, use them!  You’ll get 2-3 times the click-through rate (CTR).

3. WRITING & TESTING AD COPY

Speaker = Mona Elesseily

• If you want a quick lift in your account, write new creative!
• Put keywords in your ads. (But you know this right? Hope so.)
• Create tight ad groups with carefully targetted ads. (You know this too, right? She did say this would start basic…)
• Understand the sales cycle. Do people want more info, or do they want to buy now? You need to know. And cater for this in your ad writing. (“Financial planning” and “financial plans” are different, therefore you need very different ads.)
• Be careful with your acronyms (eg “staff” is better than “HR”).
• Include a call to action! ie Buy. Order. Call. Register.
• Now we are guessing click-through rates on her ads. It’s fun. Pretty much the whole room (and the panel) and me got it wrong. Just proves you MUST TEST! and always run MULTIPLE ads!
• You don’t need to include “www.” in the display URL.
• My tip: your starting point should be to do your first brain storming, then look at your competitor ads. You have to stand out.

Now we’re into question time.

Well that’s a wrap. Time to feed. See you after lunch.

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By Philip Shaw