Wow – Day 2 was really a good day – lots of interesting stuff. I’m writing my post at the reasonable hour of 8am today rather than 1am as the day before. Stoney’s lifted the pressure and said I didn’t have to post last night when we got back from the Google Dance.
I went to sessions on Ad Testing Research & Findings, Converting Visitors into Buyers, Creating Compelling Ads and Landing Page Testing & Tuning. Of the 4, I think the last one of the day, Landing Page Testing & Tuning had the most useful information for me. I’ll briefly sum up the topics and share the golden nugget that I took away from each session.
Ad Testing: Research & Findings
Five different speakers presented for this one and everyone did pretty good at not repeating what anyone else had to say. Anton Konikoff pressed home the reason for ad testing is to improve conversions for the client. Nico Brooks introduced a term “Route Knowledge” which demonstrates/indicates how people go the same direction to get to the same place. Jonathan Mendez, who I heard on Monday, spoke of the importance of designing your test to answer one single question. Gord Hotchkiss stressed the importance of looking to the future when testing, asking “What’s next?” Finally, we heard from Clay Bavor of Google who suggested we all step back and look at the KEYWORDS, stressing that it is the user experience in which we must be most interested.
Converting Visitors Into Buyers
At this session we heard how important it is to make the potential buyer comfortable. It is important to provide them with trustmarks so that they have confidence in your website as a secure site – people are reluctant or hesitant at the very least to make a purchase from a website until you tell them how safe you are. Even if you’re conversion is simply lead generation, people are going to be reluctant to provide you with their contact information until/unless you make them feel safe about doing so. None of us appreciates getting our email address on spam lists, simply providing a link to your privacy policy can increase confidence and result in higher leads.
The last two sessions of the day found me hand writing my notes because I didn’t get to the hall early enough to plug into power. If you want to hear a rant about my laptop, drop me an email and I’ll give you an ear full.
Creating Compelling Ads
This session was the most disappointing of the day. I arrived eager to learn how to create compelling ad text. Instead, what I learned was more of a review for topics I’d already heard. Review is never bad – but when it isn’t what I was expecting to hear, it’s disappointing. Of the three speakers, two of them discussed the important of ad testing, and the third discussed Dynamic Keyword Insertion (DKI). I can understand how the two subjects are relevant aspects of compelling ads, but somehow I expected more.
Landing Page Testing & Tuning
Again, I already stated how this was my favorite session of the day. I think I’ll be dedicating a post to this topic specifically, so I won’t go into much detail here. Besides, all my hand written notes are back in the hotel room and we’re sitting in the Wi-Fi lounge of the convention center preparing ourselves for the next round of sessions.
With that said, today my sessions are going to be: Local Search Marketing Tactics, Mobile Search Optimization, Shopping Search Tactics, and B2B Tactics. I am looking forward to Thursday’s sessions where I will be attending a variety of clinics. Until tomorrow then ….