Pubcon Las Vegas 2015: Branding, Mobile, and Beyond

Tandem Interactive's Organic Search Manager/Editor Kimberly McSweeney at Pubcon Las Vegas 2015.

This year, I was fortunate enough to attend Pubcon Las Vegas with Joe in the beginning of October, and to say that I learned a wealth of knowledge during those short four days would be an understatement. For those who may not know much about Pubcon, it is the world’s leading online marketing conference and has been named a must-attend conference by Forbes, and I have to say – they hit the nail on the head.

If you missed Pubcon you arguably missed the largest sharing of SEO/SEM and PPC knowledge to ever take place under one roof. With daily speakers, such as the leaders of the search marketing industry, this was the place to be for those who do SEO and/or have a business or startup.

After day one at Pubcon, it was clear that the theme for the year was branding. Pretty much, if your company is not creating content that serves consumers and gets your name out in the world as a reputable company that is not just there to take your business, you are not doing enough to meet the needs of users. Users don’t only want answers to their questions, they want answers that exceed far beyond the question they asked. Although this may sound impossible, with amazingly engaging content – it isn’t. As Founder of Seer Interactive Wil Reynolds put it, if you are not creating the best piece of content ever written on a subject, you are not doing content right. Users want content that will serve them in a way that will make them better. They want to read your content and be able to take something from it that makes them better, smarter, and…well…serves their egos.

“People don’t buy products, they buy better versions of themselves.” – Wil Reynolds

Once you have the most amazing piece of content created – you need to socialize it. Coupled with creating the best optimized content, socializing content will help build your brand. If you write amazing content and no one can see it on multiple social media platforms, your brand is not going to be engraved in their brains. Users’ minds need to constantly see your ads, your helpful content that answers their questions, your videos, your photos, and logos on Google, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, Pinterest, and whatever the new social media platform will be, in order for them to build awareness of your brand, as well as trust.

Of course, every business with a website wants to know about mobile. As the industry leaders put it at Pubcon, if you are just now thinking about mobile, you are behind. If you are thinking that mobile is going to be big, you are behind. Mobile is here. Mobile is now. If your site is not mobile-friendly you can bet that users are going to your competitor who is mobile compliant. Not only should your site be mobile- friendly already, but if your mobile load times are slow – you can bet users are moving on to a competitor. It may be sad for you and your business, but it is true. With every new generation, attention spans are decreasing and demands are increasing – you need to take the heat and turn it into fire for your company, or get out of the kitchen.

Pubcon Las Vegas 2015 featured the following keynote speakers and hyperlinked is Tandem’s live-blogged coverage for each:

Rand Fishkin: Founder of Moz:  SEO In A Two Algorithm World

Gary Illyes: Google: Generations XYZ

Wil Reynolds: Seer Interactive: The High Cost of Free Traffic

Daune Forrester: Bing: Data is the New Oil

John Brown & Richard Zippel: Google AdSense: Open Format Q&A

Guy Kawasaki: Canva: 10 Tips for Perfecting Your Marketing Campaign in the Age of Social Media

Other Pubcon Sessions Covered by Tandem:

Micro-Moments with Google’s Matt Rogers

Google’s Leo Sei Unmasks AdWords Automated Scripts

Jeffrey Eisenberg (chief Executive at BuyerLegends.com) and Alex Harris (creative director at AlexDesigns.com): High Conversion Landing Pages and the User Persona, The Most Popular Tools for Creating Landing Pages and Campaigns, 8 Measurement Terms for Buyer Legends

Frederick Vallaeys on Google Quality Score: What It Is and How to Improve It

Frederick Vallaeys: AdWords Scripts: Automation and Bid Management, Pubcon Tracks Conversions with Frederick Vallaeys

Michael Gray (Atlas Web Services president and owner of GrayWolfSEO.com): Top WordPress Plugins to Clean Up and Speed Up Your Site

Barry Adams (founder of Polemic Digital): Barry Adams: Crawl Waste & Optimization

Perfecting PPC Ads with Brad Geddes

Luxury Brands are Spending Big Bucks on Paid Search

By now it should be no secret that when consumers start thinking about buying personal luxuries (and virtually everything else), their shopping journeys tend to include two phases: the research phase and the purchasing phase. It is important to be in the eyes of consumers as they travel both aspects of this journey. Luxury shopping journeys commonly begin online, often with search engine inquiries either on a specific brand or with a more specific search that focuses on one particular item the brand manufactures. From there, consumers search where they can buy these items.

Big brands with bigger budgets are not shying away from Google AdWords. In fact, five of the top luxury brands in today’s retail world spend a cumulative $22 million on paid keyword campaigns in the US market last year, according to data compiled by AdGooRoo. The traditional paid search across all of their brands, not including mobile search or Product Listing Ads (PLAs) breaks down by brand as follows:

Chanel: $2,306,000

Kering (such as Gucci, Saint Laurent, Stella McCartney, Brioni, and more): $1,650,000

LVMH (such as Louis Vuitton, Celine, Givenchy, Marc Jacobs, and more), : $9,286,000

Prada: $34,000

Richemont (such as Jaeger-LeCoultre, Piaget, NET-A-PORTER, and more): $8,330,000

Luxury shopping budgets were spread out by apparel, beauty & cosmetics, shoes, handbags, and watches. According to the study, paid search is a very valuable asset for these brands when it comes to reaching consumers. It states that, “in fact, it [paid search] is considered by many brands to be one of the most effective mediums for influencing consumers while they are making crucial buying decisions.”

While your company might not sell Chanel boots, there is still a market of consumers on the web that you need to be in front of to maximize business. If you have specific questions on what you can do to boost your paid search campaign, our team at Tandem is glad to help.

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!