Over 200 Tips From SAScon Manchester 2013 (#SAScon)

It’s time once again for SAScon, so we sent three Koozians to Manchester to support one of our favourite search marketing conferences in the UK. With more than 35 speakers, and 33 talks across two rooms and two days, we’ll be posting the key points from each talk for you to bookmark for easy reference in the future.

Our very own Graeme Benge presented alongside Barry Adams from Pierce Communications on day two, showing attendees How to Deal With (not provided).

In order to cover all the talks across the two days, we also have Tara West and Graeme Benge putting together great write ups for each session to ensure we don’t miss a thing from SAScon Manchester 2013!

Day One

Sessions attended by Tara West

Keynote Speaker – Thomson Local – Alistair Thornton

• 20 percent of desktop searches have a local intent
• PPC is becoming too costly for small businesses because large businesses can bid more and still make a profit, but small businesses can’t bid that much because they have smaller margins
• ‘Self serve’ for AdWords doesn’t work, for example AdWords express etc because small businesses don’t have the expertise and it takes them too much time
• Capacity optimisation is key: if someone in your organisation isnt busy then you need to get them doing other things as it saves you time and money in other areas
• Customers only want to see reports on leads and how much they cost them, rather than other metrics such as rankings

Consumer Trends in Retail – Rob Weatherhead

• 65 percent of people move between devices when shopping online
• 50 percent of people research an online purchase offline
• 63 percent of online shoppers use multiple devices when shopping during Xmas 2012
• 23 percent of online purchases happen within 24 hours of searching online
• Over 85 percent of sales still occur offline but 2 out of 3 people research their purchase online. You must integrate your online and offline experiences.
• 84 percent of people use their smart phone in store to help them shop
• If it’s a product you want to touch and feel or talk to someone about users often research offline then purchase online
• Successful retailers will be the ones that bring the best of offline online and integrate the two experiences

Competitve Sector Focus, Retail – Neil Hardy

• Seller reviews majorly push CTRs and makes you stand out from other paid search ads
• Social is ever more important in organic 
• It’s all about share of voice 
• Sentiment is going to become much more important in the future with Google 
• Use micro formats in organic to get stand out

Advanced PPC Techniques – Ben Bisco, Ben Wightman & Laurent Boninfante

• If you are going to launch a new PPC strategy don’t do it peak season because you will need to use the previous years data and it’s risky
• You need to have your objectives very clear and easily understood before you create your strategy 
• Linear AB testing works best rather than lots of tests at once 
• Run PPC tests for a long enough period of time to get decent levels of data to base your strategy on 
• Scale your strategy and duplicate it as much as you can to make the most out of it 
• You’ll need tools to do this effectively 
• Design a strategy which systematically on a daily basis catches issues such as “if the CPC is above 30 pounds and there have been no conversions in x amount of time then lower your bids by 10 percent
• With bigger budgets and unceasingly well optimised websites advertisers are prepared to pay more per click and as result average CPCs have increased lots over the last year
• 1 in 3 PPC clicks come from smartphones – PPC ads must answer search questions effectively 
• The weight of landing pages in your quality score is becoming even more important 
• Use an excel tool or word stream tool to put keyword reports each month and store quality score data 
• Use Google Analytics site search query reports to find ideas for CTR boosting site link extensions

Stalking the Zebra – Life After Panda & Penguin – Dixon Jones, Paul Madden, Dave Naylor & Julia Logan

• Penguin 2.0 seems to have had more of an effect in France
• Google will eventually monetise it too far 
• Evaluate where your link profile is today and decide where it’s going to be in six months time 
• Penguin and panda have said ‘if we catch you doing the bad stuff we will penalise you not just discount them’ 
• Social is manipulated

Embracing Enhanced Campaigns – Jon Myers & Elroy Condor

• Enhanced campaigns are here so you can target users in context rather than just device
• Google have not decided whether they will automatically set mobile bids to the same as desktop when they automatically migrate any old campaigns to enhanced on July 22nd 
• Even if you are using a third party tool for bid management enhanced campaigns will still work 
• Enhanced campaigns brings lots of great features and you need to use them to make it work successfully 
• The next version of AdWords editor will support ad group level site links (hopefully out in the next few weeks)

SOCIAL MEDIA MEETS PR MEETS SEO – JUDITH LEWIS, CHARLOTTE WALKER & KARYN FLEETING

• You have to be multidiscinplinary to be in SEO now (eg social and PR and SEO)
• There should be defined KPIs for each agency working with then client (social, PR, and SEO)
• PR outreach tends to be more personal, where as SEO outreach tends to be based on incentives such as monetary value incentives
• Don’t be afraid to pick up the phone when doing outreach (PRs do this)
• Email address affects impression on blogger outreach

Sessions attended by Graeme Benge

Big Industry – Big Data – James Murray & Richard Rowley

• Experian know 500 things about 49 million people in 24 million households
• 98% Customer expects seamless experience regardless of channel
• Great data will make us more successful – integration
• Know Get Keep
• 15 petabytes of info created everyday. Equivalent to 200 years of continuous hd video
• Data is subjective though – people lie
• Brands should implement a similar system to a pub landlord who knows your favourite drink. Why do cash points offer a balance check when you check your balance online every time?
• Linking data sets challenge
• Get used to lies
• Data without insight is useless
• Big data understands who, what they’re interests are, and how you can optimise.

• User behaviour research. Root question is the CRT of SERP position. It will demonstrate the value of SEO albeit on a data set of 8 million desktop users.
• Multi vertical approach: automotive travel retail finance insurance
• Paid search takes large share across most verticals, but travel is the stand out
• Position 1-3 only guarantee of significant traffic. 31% traffic comes from position 1 for Automotive
• Aggregators in finance are dominating top 3 positions
• Click through Rate isn’t about keyword, but who’s number is most relevant.
• Aggregators a good example – set up for most forms of user intent. E.G. ISA: moneysavingexpert in position 2 got a better CRT than government ISA resource in position 1.
• Takeaway: click behaviour is governed by the most relevant result not just position. Keywords don’t have a set CRT or behaviour, CRT determined by the nature of result not the keyword.
• High quality Meta descriptions and rich snippets now more important than ever then.

Selecting an Agency / Perfect Pitch – Paul Cooper & Simon Calderbank

• What does an agency need to successfully pitch?
• An idea that’s relevant and then rapport
• Transparency and openness
• Be brave with a bold goal even though there are no guarantees. Show how you will move the clients business
• Likability. Access to the workers, the team carrying out the work. Monthly reporting that is clear, KPI focused.
• 3 or 4 people max including the workers.
• Demonstrate track record in a sector
• Take people capable of handling technical questions
• Someone capable of coordinating what becomes the pitch which includes picking the team. New business development people should not monopolise a pitch.
• Do homework on what the prospective is all about. Values, product features etc even values.
• Perfect length 1 hour depending on level of management present. Have a running order so you engage quickly. You are likely to be 1 of 5 agencies pitching.
• Always leave for time and feedback. Clients play poker, but will give it if asked.
• Time it so the client has enough time to converse with you as you have them.
• Give ideas before credentials that’s what they will want to hear first, your credentials back your ideas up. Its assumed that everyone is Google qualified.
• Wednesday or Thursday are the best days to pitch.
• PowerPoint personality, absence ruins the pitch.
• Use your own slides
• LinkedIn great platform to make contact. Used at night by decision makers.
• Win the pitch before you pitch…about how you engage, how you qualify your part in the clients future success
• Ask in the right way…what keeps them up at night….it’s brave and will bring you closer and likely reveal more.
• Don’t be frightened to ask for basic data – AdWords or Analytics. If it is to help you forecast they might go for it. Be brave!

Google Analytics – Clancy Childs

• The future: Google Glass, Google Fibre, Project Chauffeur, Google Now, The D-Wave 2 which is a quantum computer working with NASA.
• The scale of information is simply ginormous:
• In 2012: 2 billion people online, 6 billion mobile, 800 exabytes,
• By 2020: 5 billion online, 10 billion mobile, 53 zettabytes info
• The key challenges – cross device, cross channel, cross funnel
• If you count visits by device, you are likely to be over counting visits by a factor of 2.6
• 90% of users use multiple screens to accomplish tasks
• 77% of viewers watch TV with a device

Universal Analytics

• The measurement protocol – traditionally just websites, now trying to track all the different devices used to accomplish task so as a result you will be able to feed footfall into real time Google Analytics report.
• GA is Shifting from session based Analytics because interactions by multiple devices means cookies get counted not users.
• Rolling out User ID tracking. A user centric tracking focus. Then able to understand customer journey and lifetime value
• Can collect offline conversions – for example a site generates a quote ID that is linked to user ID to track offline conversions when they call a call centre and buy.
• Dimension widening for data not sent to the measurement protocol. CRM info for instance. For example, it will be possible to analyse which visitors by age group views XYZ product and can be stitched into GA.
• Attribution modelling – this sees GA processing data of multiple sessions prior to conversion. Building the right customised model is hard.
• Assist vs last click conversions will become more and more useful and insightful
• https://www.google.com/think/tools/customer-journey-to-online-purchase.html
• What is the business value of each marketing touch point? Identify behaviour pattern and understand likelihood of purchase: E.G. Search, then display, then email, then purchase = 3% likelihood of purchase
• BigQuery which is Google’s big data engine allows premium clients run hyper granular queries. E.g. If running TV ads, you can run a query to return user data for 15 minute intervals.
• Google excited about what can be achieved by the data experts when this rolls out.

Social Proof, ZMOT  – Bas van den Beld, Nick Garden, Abigail Harrison & Kevin Gibbons

• ZMOT is the Zero Moment Of Truth.
• The moment when you need to find out about a product or service, the moment you reach for a device to find out more.
• First moment is triggered by words and images – descriptive text.
• Second moment is when the decision is made and the user moves to experience
• Ultimate moment of truth is what they then share about it
• As SEOs we now need to interact more with audiences and PR as link quantities to influence audiences. Content Marketing and PR outreach will mean more compelling copy exists to capitalise on individual ZMOT
• Content raises awareness and prompts consideration and influence so target authority publishers to reach new audiences. It’s generates trust and credibility.

Winning in a Multi-Screen World – Richard Gregory & Rich Quick

• Mobile commerce is here: 2011 – 7%, 2012 – 25%
• Mobile email now 50%
• 58% of businesses not embracing mobile email
• What do you do? Ignore pcs
• Get straight to then point
• Call to actions above the fold
• Responsive design is when a browser adapts to a users device
• Its just one line of code
• Ensure landing pages are prioritised for responsive design. Offline marketing will likely mean landing pages are viewed on a mobile or tablet
• Good examples of responsive design are: BBC, thenextweb,
• Mobile vs responsive design:
• Mobile can cause technical issues with redirects. Not a good fit if regularly doing email campaigns.
• Apps have some advantages like API access to leverage Geo targeting. However the level of interaction is likely to low for a user to want to download an app.
• Natural tendency is to shove all desktop content into responsive design which means everything gets smaller. Do the opposite as links need bigger target areas
• Use technology to understand device – don’t serve a recommendation for a blackberry app to an iPhone user.
• Understand intent – if a user goes to your site from a mobile a more appropriate message would be to show to get there rather than a generic sales message.
• The future? Keep an eye on the car industry as looks to enriched in-car use. F
• Both Ford and GM are developing API for developer to access.
• Transmedia campaigns – used in promotion of the film Prometheus. In addition to traditional trailers there were online tasks to complete that revealed character back story, there was offline promotion with Weyland corporation appearing at conferences despite being a fictional entity of a film. The upshot is a viral 3D presence for a story. The film was a fantastic box office success.

Sessions attended by Laura Philips

WordPress Luvfest – Maximising WordPress for Search – Simon Wharton,  Joost de Valk & Bastian Grimm

• Use unique keys and says to add random elements for encryption & a cryptic prefix to prevent automatic scripts and SQL injections. Only use plug ins from trusted authors as you are handing over control 
• Remove default admin, set up new user as admin & log out. Login with new admin and delete old one, use a STRONG password
• Never search for free WordPress themes. Use ‘TAC’ plug in which scans themes for encryptions and redirections etc. Scan your theme daily for viruses, modifications etc & stay up to date!
• A Drupal Yoast SEO plug in is on it’s way…
• Google would rather show authors than star ratings and reviews, so if you are a retail site authorship might not be such a good thing for your business.

Making it Personal – Matt Roberts & Barry Adams

• Elements of Personalised Search: Location, Search history, Browsing history, Social circles, Known interests
• Google doesn’t always get it right such as giving US results for a shared UK town name
• Google filters results based on what it knows of you which can result in the same search by users with differing political views getting different results. Which are the ‘best’ results? Is this a good thing?
• “In Google’s world public space is just something that stands between your house and the well reviewed restaurant that you are dying to get to” Evgeny Morozov. Google want to you to walk into the stores who have paid them to get you there; could this not damage public engagement?
• Google will show you things it knows you like/will buy, creating a Filter Bubble: SERPS will be full of sites you visit regularly. News will be only from sites you age with. World views will become increasingly polarised, isolated and self perpetuating
• Why is it dangerous? People get things wrong all the time, you won’t know you’re wrong if everything you see agrees with you. Never get exposed to alternate viewpoints. May end up with unshakable conviction stay maybe based on flawed information
• Diversify your digital services, stop using Google, find new websites, use amazon in a private session and install ad block plus, read different newspapers and explore your world.

Breaking the Law, Search and Social, A Legal Perspective – Steve Kuncewicz

• ASA are finally looking at cookie usage and policies quite carefully. Behavioural Advertising customises ads based on your browsing history. Exceptions are: contextual ads, web analytics, first party OBA and mobile devices (but not for long).
• Is implied consent now ok? Maybe! You do of need to obtain consent every time someone visits a website only the first time. Data Protection Reform: reforms currently under discussion, unpopular changes. What consent is required will probably be explicit again, and could create issues for marketers. Email marketing must be ‘opt in’ except for limited exceptions. ‘soft opt in’ is ok but NOT for 3rd parties. 
• Right To Be Forgotten will come into law quite soon.
• Penalties can be quite harsh from the ASA including enhanced naming and shaming, refusal of advertising space, even banner advertising to make users aware that you have breached the ASA regulations.)
• Interflora vs. M&S case: Competitor keyword targeting ‘not inherently objectionable’ but do NOT use competitor name in text of ad, thin ice…

Maximising Brand Reputation Online – Kristal Ireland, Nils Mork-Ulnes & Robin Wilson

• Constantly listen, delays can do damage aka the Nestlé fiasco. Plan for different scenarios, be prepared. Have response protocols in place so you can react quickly in any situation. Everything you put out there impacts reputation. Think about the worst thing that could happen in social media and know how your audience who are likely to react.
• Most conversations online are not about brands. What makes people share online? Stay relevant and and understand your audience. Don’t talk about yourself, talk about them, people are most inclined to talk about themselves and things that impact upon them. discover conversations you can occupy that fit your brand, are large or will be, appeals to your target audience, and is actually interesting. 
• The number of average information sources used by consumers coupled between 2010 and 2011 to 10.4.
• It will continue to get harder to see how users get information about your brand.”when we say it’s positive, the machine about 21% of the time says it’s negative” – Coca Cola.
• Word of mouth has 2.1 billion impressions a day in the Us alone. Only 6% occur online, but are seem by many more people than offline. 63% of people cited word of mouth to be a highly credible source of information. It tends to be positive. Online word of mouth correlates with sales. Positive Tweets explain 5 x the variability of sales of advertising in video games.

Online Consumer Psychology – Bas van den Beld

• When something works people repeat it and repeat it. When they reach overkill they may blame the platform. Brands often think getting Likes is enough, it is not. Put yourself the shoes of those you wish to interact with and who will be a brand ambassador, build a conversation.
• You need to understand your target audience? What makes them happy? There is no average user,everyone is different. Data cannot tell you everything, get closer to your users via social media. People don’t always realise what they are thinking, like an illusion. We want to believe we understand what is going on via confirmation within ourselves or via confirmation by others. We want trust to help make our decisions. 
• What are people doing online? Everything, they do online what they do offline. Chit chat online builds connections and bonds users. It helps them work out who they do and do not want to be associated with. Even boring Tweets can get a lot of attention because people can associate with it.
• Only 5% of teens on Facebook limit what their parents can see on Facebook, they don’t care, it is their voice. The more friends a teen has on Facebook the more their overall social networking activity increases across all social media sites. Don’t try to directly sell on social media, people are there to relax. Gently move your product without pushing it in your influencers faces. 
• Word of mouth is responsible for 20-50% of purchases. Only 7% of word of mouth marketing is online, but the majority starts online. Create trust and credibility around your brand. People trust people.
• “You is the most powerful word in the English language because people are ultimately interested in fulfilling their own needs”
• Social media is the perfect platform to show off, of influencers have a big ego – give your product away. Adapt to people’s situations. What are they doing? When when you target them they aren’t paying attention to you, they are doing other things. Action the situation, timing has to be perfect. do things offline to help you online. Use data to ally look at people, and work out what they want and when, put yourself in their shoes.

Day Two

Sessions Attended By Laura Phillips

Keynote Interview – Mike Little

• 67 million deployments of WordPress currently. In 2002 a group of bloggers were using B2, and the guy who created it disappeared, and could not be contacted. There were security issues and one of the community decided to take the software and develop it. Took everything over, and first release came out 2003.
• Mike thinks it became such a success because it is simple to use, open source GPL means anyone can create services, plug ins, themes etc, and because of the community around it, fantastic support etc. 
• WordPress.com is effectively banned in some more repressed countries because it is so easy to use that it gives everyone a voice where some regimes may disapprove. 
• WordPress have embraced mobile quite well, not perfect but is adapting and is still quite easy to use. They are still working on it. All major mobile devices have a mobile WordPress app. 
• Biggest challenges for the future are keeping up with tech and user expectations, people expect more from their interactions with the web.

Increasing Site Engagement – Neil Hardy, Jeff Coughlan & Lee Duddell

• 67% of users start on a smartphone and complete on a computer. Often this so because it is hard to check out, and they want a full experience. They don’t always feel they are getting all the information on a mobile site.
• Returns policy is really really important. Returns = Conversions. It is a conversion beacon, but is often ignored. 
• Users hate carousels, 32% find them annoying, most others ignore them. This is across every sector. 
• To help increase conversions watch 5 users on your site to find out why the struggle and see of your hunches are correct. Watch them form starting at Google, and see what search terms they use and what they respond to best.
• Stop guessing why people leave and what you should do to improve it, and find out why…

Searching Beyond Words: Video and Image Optimisation – Richard Gregory & Alex Blaikley

• If you want your images to appear more prominently you must label your images with a descriptive name, description and alt tag. Simple.
• Our attention span is falling – 8 seconds in 2012 compared to 12 seconds in 2000. Only 4% spend longer that ten minutes on a page. Sharing behaviour in the main sees people share images and images. Facebook reported 1.1 billion images shared in 48 hours. (31 December 2012 to 1st January 2013).
• Move away from optimising. That just serves yourself not the end user. Make your images better and so will your audience by sharing.
• YouTube – the customer is the co creator of value. The cartridge people created a Lego video which simply demonstrated the customer service ethos. The Lego has little product relevance.
• The money shop featured a character that caught enough attention that people commented. Petrol guy now has his own YouTube channel.
• Webvideomarketing.org is a repository for video marketing knowledge
• Top challenges marketers face are cost, complexity and lack of video assets.
• Video plays a role in acquisition pre-sale, conversion or sales and lastly post sale or customer retention.

Cutting Edge Search Technology –Ben Bisco, Dom Hodgson & Jon Myers

• Cross channel sites such as search and display are processed into your data such as ad severs and Analytics via a product such as Marin for using optimisation, campaign managements and reporting and Analytics. Measure, manage and optimise to understand what your cost centre is and how to best use your budget. Use your data to meet customer goals.
• Why use a PPC management platform? If you spend a lot of time using spreadsheets, time could be spent better if you let tech take care of that part for you. How much time could you save? Reinvest that time in optimisation and strategy. Generate financial uplift via automated bidding. Uplift globally averages 21-25%. 
• Improve visibility into data and the ability to run it into revenue optimising actions. Plug search into the data that matters most to your business. Survey Monkey reports that in one case study increased LTV for key international campaigns by 150%. For AMF Bowling monthly revenues from paid search increased by 1000%’ converse rates increased by 74%. TUI saw one brand increase revenue from online advertising by 30%. 
• Organic search tools: easier to build your own tool than you think. Be careful when crawling, or get your tech guys to do it. Prepare for scale and no one respects free, think about pricing and VAT. 
• Always challenge those trying to sell you this technology and understand the environment.

Understanding the Role of Social in Search – Judith Lewis & Bas van den Beld

• Social does impact Google. Social and search are both important to people. It’s not just about increasing ranking, it’s about keeping the competition out by keeping your social profiles in. G+ does impact search and people. Matt Cutts says plus ones don’t affect rankings ‘yet’.
• Social search. They can work together but they are changing, especially in the last 6 months. Twitter search changed in February so you can search a lot further. Bing has also started to change, integrating Facebook more and creating a social bar. Linked In is also moving towards search. Google themselves are integrating maps etc too. 
• Bas tested on Koozai. SERPs results often had better title and descriptions. The Facebook results outranked the Google plus results in some cases. What we shared wasn’t a normal post but was the Google plus page. So we outranked our own Google plus update by putting it on Facebook. does Google plus make Facebook posts rank? Images improve visibility on Facebook but not on search? 
• Always keep testing, think about goals for every update, use Facebook, make people share your content, don’t just optimise for google, and social IS expanding.
• Will google force authorship? Schmidt said authorship very important and people may have not use it if they want to rank well. Topical authority is very likely to be important.it is natural for these guys to reciprocal link and cite themselves. If you’re not getting natural links to your blog then you may not be marketing it right.

Sessions Attended By Tara West

Content Outreach, Getting it Right – Bas van den Beld, Kevin Gibbons & Lisa Myers

• Content marketing has broadened their target audience as a market because people don’t see content marketing negatively, but they may see SEO as having a bad reputation
• You must set goals before you start content marketing 
• Be quick and get content turned around quickly for newsworthy content, but don’t rely on only this as you need both high quality and long content in your strategy 
• Target influencers that need content e.g. people who are influencers on Twitter 
• SEOs who can write and create content well (in a creative way) are really valuable

Integrating Search and Social with the Wider Marketing Mix – Judith Lewis, Andy Betts, Jon Myers, Mark Mitchell & Andrew Warren Payne

• Econsultancy survey will state that most people still dint know what Google Plus does
• Econsultancy survey will state that around 40 percent of companies consider social to be part of their search campaign

• If you’ve got data remember to put it into use: optimise your site based on the data
• Mobile phone conversions are increasing although they aren’t the main device to convert on
• Search is central to all other mediums even offline (67 percent of all media spend results in an interaction with search at some stage

• Avoid looking at only last click attribution or you wont know what took a part in making something successful -You can’t just rely on search, you need to look at earned media as a whole
• Planning is critical when interacting all your marketing activity
• Do your research well before you integrate
• Constantly fine tune and adjust your strategy based on the results if measuring each step of the journey
• Differentiate between strategy and tactics

Keynote – Jeff Coghlan

• Figital is a mix of digital and physical
• There are no single purpose machines anymore, e.g. games consoles are now entertainment consoles 
• The boundaries of what things are defined as are increasingly blurred (e.g. TV are like games) 
• Content shouldn’t belong to a device, it should belong to the user 
• Shops need to stop fighting against technology and work with it

Attribution, Getting the Bigger Picture – Neil Charles

• There are three kinds of attribution models: first click, last click and a model which attributes the conversion to both
• You need to decide whether it is worth spending out on an attribution model and how inaccurate last click is fir different traffic sources 
• People tend to be exposed to lots of other mediums but then finally convert via search which is why we need an alternative for last quick attribution 
• You need to ask yourself “if I take this ad medium away, how many sales would I use”
• You also need to consider bow tv and offline media effects things and for this you need econometrics measurement

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