Search Engine Strategies, Day 1
I’m not going to do a whole rehash of Day 1 at Search Engine Strategies (I’m sure that plenty of bloggers will be doing that), but I wanted to hit some highlights.
Google doesn’t see separate management of search and content match as a priority
I just thought this was funny - Brian Axe, a Sr. Product Manager for content match with Google, was asked directly in the Q&A why content match required a “quick and dirty workaround” to test by itself (NOTE: To test content match by itself, you have to make a duplicate campaign, drop the bid and enable content match on the new campaign - after it is enabled, disable content match of your original campaign). Brian said that “Google is not opposed to separating out content match, but they have other priorities” above this feature. Come on, Google - search and content match are your bread and butter. I would definitely think that you could make this a priority unless there’s something that you don’t want us to know…
Jeremy Zawodny shows up for the API session
OK, I’m not a technical guy, but I figured that the session on API’s would be helpful to understand for some new projects we have coming up at Sewell. So I showed up at the session and was pleasantly surprised to see Jeremy Zawodny on the panel (he was not listed in the show guide, but because he works like 15 minutes away it probably wasn’t a big deal to pop in). I’ve been reading his blog for a while now and I continue to be impressed with how forthright he is - he never unneccessarily plugs Yahoo products and I have even seen him talk about Google products that are superior to comparable Yahoo products… of course, in these cases, Yahoo is usually quick to clean up the features.
His speaking style was very similar to his blogging - direct, to the point and easy to understand. He explained Yahoo’s Advertiser Web Services and gave a pretty compelling argument for the REST interface when dealing with API’s rather than SOAP (but did mention that AWS would probably support SOAP eventually). After the session, I got a chance to meet him, which was cool. He’s a nice, smart guy - a poster child of a “search evangelist, geek and blogger” (a direct quote from his business card).
Yahoo’s Search Night Off at Great America
I’m finding that when you pay for a conference (rather than attend for free like I usually do with high tech shows), the advertisers tend to treat you a lot better. After the day’s seminars were over, they loaded everybody up into buses and took us to Paramount’s Great America. They let us in the park for free and provided a huge barbeque for the conference attendees. My wife met me there with her little brother and sister and some of their friends - it was a fun way to end a long day of meetings.
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[…] 1) The Google Mini is a hardware and software solution that was easy to implement. 2) The Google Mini only cost $3K - this may sound expensive, but when considering the ease of use and strain it takes off of our existing servers it is actually quite cheap. 3) At Search Engine Strategies they reported that about 33% of purchases online are the result of some type of site search (note: this sounds high to me but even at a fraction of this figure it is compelling to make an investment in site search). 4) Google knows search better than anyone else - it’s a fact. […]
Pingback by The Preston Blog - An internet marketing blog for internet retailers » Google Mini and site search — October 28, 2005 @ 2:13 pm
[…] When I was at Search Engine Strategies in San Jose a few months ago I talked about Google not letting advertisers manage search and content match bids separately. To manage them separately advertisers had to do an inconvenient workaround that required setting up two separate campaigns and disabling content match on one of them. […]
Pingback by The Preston Blog - An internet marketing blog for internet retailers » Separate management of search and content match in Google — December 1, 2005 @ 8:51 pm
[…] This is a great way to get the best information from the event without having to throw down a couple of thousand dollars to attend it (though, if you get a chance it is definitely worth it - the most important things I learned from SES San Jose were at the networking lunches with other internet retailers). […]
Pingback by The Preston Blog - An internet marketing blog for internet retailers » SES Chicago — December 5, 2005 @ 3:14 pm