SES London 2009 Review

4th
MAR

Posted by Michael under Paid Search, SEO Conferences and Exhibitions

SES London is still the pre-eminent UK search marketing conference. Overall SES London is still useful if you are involved in Search but the really useful “nuggets” seem to be fewer and further apart,

The good

The presentations I enjoyed were:

1. Rob Pierre, Managing Director, Jellyfish

Advanced Paid Search Techniques

This was a really interesting and rather technical presentation on advanced methodologies for paid search campaign management.

He showed by having each keyword in all 3 match types how to make the campaign as targeted as possible. The essence of his methodology was to ensure that each keyword was associated with the most targeted ad copy possible and the most relevant landing page on the website.

The interesting part for me was how he used negative matching of keywords to ensure the correct ad text and landing page were shown. For example he would negative match on a brand term such as Sony to ensure that a search for digital camera would display a more general ad text and landing page.

2. Nick Seckold Head of Search, MindShare

Advanced Paid Search Techniques

Nick Seckold in his presentation weighed up the Value of Automated Bid Management Tools. With the popularity of bid management tools and the huge claims being made by some of the vendors, it was useful to hear about the reality of using bid management tools to manage a PPC campaign.

3. Pete Wailes, Managing Director, Searchlight Digital

Advanced Paid Search Techniques

In his presentation Pete should how Taguchi Arrays can be used to improve PPC testing. Genichi Taguchi developed statistical methods originally to improve the quality of manufactured goods. The benefit of his method is that it allows multivariate tests to generate usable data, without having to run every possible combination.

This allows PPC copy, landing pages and other factors all to be tested in one go.

The Bad

1. Mike Chowney, Managing Director Kenshoo UK

Search Advertising Tools

Maybe he was badly briefed but the session was supposed to be about “a range of popular search engine advertising tools.“

In this session Mike Chowney banged on about how good Kenshoo is !

Maybe it’s just me but when a speaker gets up at conference and shamelessly plugs their own product it really gets my goat. I have paid up to £995 per person for my ecommerce team to be at the conference. Do I really want to pay to hear your sales spiel ? I think not.

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