He represented Unbounce and his talk was the final CTA Conference act. Michael Aagaard, Senior Conversion Optimizer at Unbounce, strode onto the stage knowing his performance had to be good.
His goal? Reduce digital marketing smokescreens.
Finalizing our CTA Conference recap comes this aggregation of all of our actionable takeaways which should help you with conversion rate optimization.
This part of our CTA Conference recap focuses on the actionable conversion rate optimization techniques we learned on Day 2. If you haven’t read it yet, please go to the first part of our day 2 recap of Unbounce’s conference.
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Our second day at Unbounce’s CTA Conference 2016 in Vancouver. For Day 1, click here.
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Recently the Vantage team attended Unbounce’s Call To Action Conference in Vancouver, where, over two days, we learned and networked with both local and international conversion rate optimization experts.
Speakers covered both specific techniques and high-level strategies for landing page testing and conversion rate optimization that we’d love to share with you.
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Mike here—more commonly known around the office as the “landing page guy”—to give you the lowdown on CTAConf. Having won tickets to the conference through talking with the Unbounce team about improvements to the platform and submitting a feature request document, we were the lucky few that received two free tickets to their annual conference! With the primary topic of the conference being centered on conversion rate optimization, Steve and I decided to take the reins and attend the conference. With landing pages still fresh on my mind, I was eager to learn new industry trends and broaden my scope of the discipline. The conference extended over a two day period with loads of content on a variety of hot industry topics.
Located on beautiful Granville Island, Vancouver, we were surrounded by views of the ocean and city. The two level building provided a constant stream of snacks and refreshments making our experience that much more rewarding. Staff and speakers kept the energy high from the moment you arrived until you left.
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It’s difficult advertising online. It can be a struggle to find the right PPC ad networks. You have questions. What are the strengths and weaknesses of Google Ads? We’re here to help.
We will take advantage of Vantage’s experience in the PPC world to explain the strengths and weaknesses of some of the most popular online PPC ad networks.
By the end, you will have a strong understanding of which online PPC ad networks are right for you.
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It has been a week since my journey to Portland for the 2015 Hero Conference. If you don’t know, no, it’s not a celebration of the best and brightest Marvel or DC superheroes. It’s actually a celebration of the best and brightest PPC heroes, taking its name from the PPC resource repository, ppchero.com. The self-proclaimed “unapologetically PPC conference series” is a three-year-running event dedicated to discussion and innovation in the PPC industry.
Last year, Steve and I attended HeroConf 2014 in Austin, Texas. I’d be without my partner in crime this time around, but I had his full blessing, and was looking forward to HeroConf 2015.
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Search Marketing Expo (SMX) is hosted in multiple locations across the United States and other countries all over the world including: England, Germany, Australia, France, Sweden, Israel, and Italy. Of the many locations where SMX is held, there are only two that play host to SMX Advanced. Luckily for us, one of those two is just a few hours south from us in Seattle Washington.
As the name suggests, SMX Advanced is for experienced internet marketers; covering advanced topics and tactics in fast-paced sessions. As with previous years, this year’s SMX Advanced did not disappoint.
Being a busy time for us, we decided to squeeze in a few hours of work at the office Monday morning before hitting the road at around lunchtime to start our drive. Fast forward a few hours and we were enjoying the evening sun atop the Bell Harbor International Conference Center for the SMX Meet-and-Greet.
Beautiful evening for a rooftop meet & greet!
My SMX experience got off to an excellent start Monday morning as I attended a session titled ‘The Mad Scientists of Paid Search’. Chris Haleua from Adobe kicked off the session in true mad scientist style, using the laws of physics and the process of solving a Rubik’s cube to present a method on Actionable SEM Analysis Patterns. Sound confusing? Basically, Chris explained how he breaks down his data into segments in order to focus his optimization efforts on the highest impact areas of an account. There are so many different ways to do this but the process Chris has created and the theory behind it are quite solid.
Chris’ thought process!
Chris Haleua’s 3×3 Analysis
Next I was off to attend a session focused on Enhanced Campaigns which has been all the talk lately. During the session, one big question that I had been wondering about was answered.
Both Jeff Allen from Hanapin and Brad Geddes from Certified Knowledge were far from successful in getting a campaign to show 100% on mobile devices. This is big news as it confirms we do have to accept the new campaign types, at least for now. With that in mind we should be focusing our efforts on taking advantage of the good new features that these campaigns bring instead of on trying to trick the system into running the way it used to in the past.
For the afternoon I would have to say the highlight was the You & A with Matt Cutts; head of Google’s web-spam team. Just like last year, Matt and Search Engine Land’s founding editor Danny Sullivan put on a show that was both informative and fun. More stuffed animals this year as Danny joked about how he had picked up on the naming convention Google was using for updates. As the last major updates were Panda and Penguin, Danny brought along his guesses for the next update: a pig, a pug and a polar bear!
The Matt Cutts Debunking Flowchart T-Shirt
Danny Sullivan & Matt Cutts
The After Dark Party, sponsored by Bing, was again hosted at the Seattle Aquarium. As seems to be the norm with conferences, the party happens right in the middle of the session days. I feel like this is a test for attendees and everyone gets a good laugh from it as it’s pretty easy to tell at the next day’s sessions who got carried away at the party.
The open bar and photo booth with goofy props were hits as always, but this year’s after dark party had something really unique. It took a while before I went to investigate what the hour long lineup was for, but when I finally did I saw The Bumby’s! The Bumby’s are two anonymous New York performance artists that, using nothing more than their manual typewriters and charming wit, provide you a personalized assessment of what they think your looks say about you. You can review mine below.
Bing hanging out with the fish.
The Bumby’s giving out “Fair and Honest Appraisals of Your Appearance”.
It was a bow-tie type of event.
Day 2 kicked off with a presentation from the man with the longest job title at the entire conference: Gurdeep Singh Pall, Corporate Vice President, Information Platform & Experience Team, Microsoft. Gurdeep presented on what he sees as the future of Search and how users will interact with the devices they are making the searches on.
The main idea is that we will be moving away from having little boxes that you type queries in, to a more human type of interaction similar to how we speak to other people (like the direction Apple’s Siri is headed). The devices we use to search will evolve as well, performing searches by speaking to our gaming consoles, Google glasses, maybe one day even our fridges.
Gurdeep’s presentation was interesting, but I felt it would be better suited as a mass presentation to the entire world and that he should have presented on something much more targeted towards the SEO/PPC audience that was present.
After Gurdeep’s presentation I was off to attend Pro Level Tips to Succeeding at Remarketing. The session started off with good presentations from both Susan Waldes of PPC Associates and Bryant Garvin of Get Found First.
Susan presented case studies highlighting the performance experienced with the new Remarketing types that have recently become available: Dynamic Remarketing, Search Companion Remarketing and Similar Users Remarketing. Then Bryant Garvin presented on remarketing channels other than Google.
Unfortunately, the third speaker, Jarvis Mak from Rocketfuel used his presentation time to blatantly plug Rocketfuel. Not to be harsh, and I’m sure Rocketfuel offers a great service, but I feel that Jarvis should have had to pay for a booth in the trade area in order to give the sales pitch that he did.
Insert random pictures of Adobe cookies!
And Adobe cupcakes!
The PLAs session was extremely informative. It wasn’t just another session where presenters would give a quick overview of a case study or their method, but instead, presenters really got down into exactly how they create, manage and optimize their PLA campaigns.
The highlight for me actually came after the session was completed when I had an in depth conversation with Micah Heath from TQE Marketing on how Vantage could tackle PLAs for our clients’ unique situations. Micah very open to helping out and provided some great advice, even going as far as presenting an invite to contact him again if we needed any further assistance. Thanks Micah!
The last session of SMX was the hardest to decide on as I was really excited for both PPC Tactics & Tools and Extreme Excel Excellence. Both sessions focused on ways to improve performance and save time through automation, tools and templates. With one of my main projects of recent being to improve our productivity through tools, templates and scripts, these sessions were highly anticipated.
In the end, I headed to the Excel session and Steve attended PPC Tactics & Tools.
As was expected, Extreme Excel Excellence had a ton of great presentations filled with actionable insights. One of my favourite speakers was Annie Cushing from AnnieLytics.com. Annie showed us the different things she does in Excel to “Make Your Data Sexy”. When your data is sexy it becomes effortless for your clients to see the important information and understand the point you are trying to get across. As reporting seems to be a neglected area for many small PPC outfits, solo operations and even larger firms, this was a great topic for a presentation.
Brett Snyder from Nebo got very technical with excel formulas during his presentation about building tools and templates. As per my comments earlier, this was a presentation that couldn’t have been timelier for me. Brett was also kind enough to share with us a bidding tool that he created which I’m very excited to analyze and compare to the bidding tools I have been working on!
On the other end of the spectrum, John Gagnon from Microsoft used his time slot to demo a new plugin for Excel 2013, code named GeoFlow (now officially called Maps in Power View). GeoFlow is an amazing tool that displays your data in the context of geography. And although I’m sure this wasn’t the main purpose behind its design, GeoFlow works exceptionally well with PPC and SEO data. I can definitely picture using GeoFlow in the future to analyze data and report to clients.
Extreme Excel Excellence
Excel GeoFlow in use
And that pretty much wraps up our time in Seattle for SMX Advanced 2013.
I’ll leave you with a video of GeoFlow in action. Unfortunately it’s not being presented as excitingly as it was presented to us by John Gagnon, but a quick skim through will give you a small idea of what it is.
