SFIMA Pubcon Keynote: The Key to Amazon's Empire

Last Thursday was the SFIMA / Pubcon Annual Summit at the Fort Lauderdale Convention Center. With 18 sessions, 2 keynotes and over 30 of Digital Marketing's best internet gurus it comes to no surprise there was only a 1% no-show rate for the 200 marketers that registered for the event. 

The morning keynote was presented by Jeffrey Eisenberg, Co-founder of FutureNow Inc. and author of 'Call-to-Action' and 'Waiting for your cat to bark?', about the '4 Pillars of Amazon's Success'. His one hour keynote was extremely informative, given Amazon is very secretive about their business strategies. 

The 4 Pillars of Success are as followed:

1. Customer Centricity
2. Continuous Optimization 
3. Culture of Innovation 
4. Corporate Agility

First is Customer Centricity. "80% of Company's believe they are customer centric; 8% of their customers would agree".  Amazon has focused their company on giving the consumer exactly what they want - better customer centric service with lower priced items. 

Amazon offer Continuous Optimization. They focus on 4 key points for their optimization objectives:

• Selection
• Price
• Availablility
• Experience

This continuous effort from Amazon has shown that 2/3 of their web purchases are returning visitors; and not only are they returning, but they visit Amazon 3x more and spend (on average) 3x-5x more than new customers. 

Apple is not the only business to be successful in the Culture of Innovation. When analyzing the data of Amazon's reports they look at the data not as a "here it is" but rather a "here is what it could be". Amazon has also created the next generation CEO with the title of the "Customer Experience Officer". With making the head of the company's focus on the customer experience, Amazon is taking customer service to a whole new level. 

Corporate Agility is the ability for a business to adapt rapidly and cost efficiently in the corporate world. Amazon has uses different software to help with their agility opportunities. One software that is used is for Amazon's pay-per-click marketing campaign is DataPop. DataPop has allowed Amazon to create high-performing, customized, relevant ads that have in-turn doubled Amazon's PPC conversion rate and lower their cost per lead. Through DataPop's dynamic keyword ad strategies, Amazon is able to provide more relevant and targeted ads that result in a better customer experience and more sales. 

BloomReach is a software used to help Amazon's Organic ratings on all search engines. BloomReach's data driven technology has allowed Amazon to deliver relevant content that has optimized the customer's experience across multiple channels. Neiman Marcus released statistics after using BloomReach for SEO purposes and confirmed a 31% increase in organic reach! 

The SFIMA / Pubcon Summit was a great one day conference that targeted all areas of digital marketing. If you were not able to attend the conference, Pubcon Las Vegas is from October 6 - 9, 2014 at the Las Vegas Convention Center. If you are interested in attending please contact Joe Laratro for an exclusive coupon code. We hope to see you there! 

Step Inside AdWords Recap

The 'pumped up' Inside AdWords livestream was earlier today. Jerry Dischler, Vice President of Product Management, lead the livestream through the next wave of advertising efforts from Google and the new betas advertisers should be eager to get their hands on.

The livestream was broken down into 3 major points:

• Innovated Ads
• Insightful Reporting
• Intelligent Tools

Innovated Ads was focused mostly on the importance of applications and how to successful engage your audience to lead towards app-based conversions. "Apps are a solution to the users initial problem", said Dischler. 

The friction within the problem and solution is that 60% of apps that are developed have never been installed. Google's recommendations were to use app-keyword suggestions and use PPC ads to help with the awareness of the app and its purpose that will lead to the download, engagement, and ultimately conversion. 

Insightful Reporting concentrated on the Estimated Total Conversion launch last year and the tools that are still betas being developed by Google. The Estimated Total Conversions allow you to estimate total conversions across multiple channels: Desktop, Mobile and Phone. 

But the main topic touched on was the exclusive betas being tested to select companies that give the ability to  integrate online marketing efforts with offline results. Two companies exposed to the beta were Shutterfly and Express Clothing. Google's three main focuses in the development of this multi-channel conversion integrator are:

1. Consumer Value
2. Maintaining the Consumer's Privacy
3. Actual Measurable Results

This beta has a lot of potential to show a more accurate ROI if Google can fulfill those three focuses. Most people believe that a beta test serves only the purpose of ensure the quality of the product before launching; however that is not the case. Although Google want to ensure there are no 'bugs' in launching this new tool, they are using this opportunity to significantly improve the marketing of this product and to look ahead to future tools/betas. I can only imagine how eager marketers are to get their hands on this beta upon being available to the public. 

The final topic was Intelligent Tools. AdWords has really been pushing new tools for measuring our data accurately (which will make my job easier!) and two of these tools recently launched are the Bulk Actions and the Automatic Bidding Option. When making mass changes for large clients, most advanced marketers would use AdWords Editor (again, to just make our lives a little simpler); Google has now given the Bulk Actions option on the AdWords interface to allow for larger changes across the account. This allows you to make location changes and other large scale changes on the interface opposed to using Editor. 

The Automatic Bidding option is a very convenient tool that allows the marketer use a programmed goal strategy (opposed to manual CPC) marketing and let's Google AdWords do the heavy lifting. By telling Google your campaigns main focus is: 1) ROA, 2) CPA, or 3) Clicks , Google can use your performance history to create a marketing strategy focused on your objective. 

The final two tools are tools that are still being developed but that I personally am very excited about. Tool one is the Enhanced Reporting and tool two is Drafts & Experiments. As a NeuroMarketer there is nothing I love more than the ability to test my campaigns. When I first entered the field of marketing, one of my professors told me that "a tester's work is never done". 

When you believe that you have optimized your campaigns structure as much as humanly possible, you haven't! You can always run A/B test on ads and landing pages. Although Google isn't THAT advanced (yet!) they are working on a tool that will let you test different bidding strategies and other options within the AdWords interface that will compare your previous performance with your new metrics... Pretty Cool!

Overall, Jerry Dischler did a great job presenting the statistics that Google generated from advertisers and the new betas marketers have to look forward to. As always, Tandem keeps up with the latest Google updates in PPC, SEO, and Neuromarketing :) Until next time!