As you know, was on yesterday in the Royal Hospital Kilmainham. I must admit, this was an amazing venue to pick for such an event. It had the old school nature of the 17th Century with a strange twist of Modern Art everywhere!
Enough about the venue how was the event? I had really high expectations with the line up of speakers. At the end of the conference I came out a bit let down. The event as a whole seemed to be directed heavily at marketing agencies and potential clients. I understand that this is normally the case in a lot of event of this nature, but at the price of the tickets (€300-500) I really expected something more informative.
The highlight for me was meeting up with some of the guys that are in the real SEO scene in Ireland. Most of them are mainly fresh and up-coming companies, not limited by the boundaries of traditional mediums or practices. I met up with Dave Davis from , Richard Hearne from , Alastair McDermot from and some of the guys from . Some truly great banter was going on during and after the event. Dave Davis had what I can only describe as a novel idea.. A drink for a link! So there ye go Dave.
So a quick review of each seminar that I attended..
Search Engine Marketing: An Introduction
I only caught the tail end of this a due to me picking one of the longest routes to the venue in the world. Danny was basically describing the fundamentals of why SEO is required and basically why we have a demand for SEO.
Search Marketing Successes & Case Studies
This was a bit of a sales fest in my opinion. The one actual case study (the large hotel group) seemed to know more than the two “Professional” SEO speakers. On the other hand, the hotel group was somewhat anal regarding the treatment of affiliates. They described how they went through 3 months of hard work with Google to protect the hotel group’s trademarks and brands from their own affiliates. They also encouraged other companies to invest time in doing this “as soon as possible”.
Maybe I missed something here, isn’t the idea of an affiliate scheme to help encourage sales via indirect methods. The group would have saved on advertising, on management fees and on overheads as a whole. Maybe someone was trying to keep themselves in a job? If your affiliates are outbidding you, so what! They are also outbidding your competitors and making the market more crowded in your space. This can only be beneficial as a whole. I know Dave had a very strong opinion about this because he dose a lot of affiliate sales, so I will let him do a follow up on this topic.
Search Engines Forum: – The Future of Search
We had some interesting tidbits from Yahoo regarding an image mash up service. This could possibly integrated with flicker to create a 3 dimensional landscape (not literally), where images can be uploaded and used as a tool to search for a particular information related to that photo. To dumb it down a bit.. I guess this would be like some kind of digital photo fingerprint! But I guess in this case it’s hooked into one massive database. PS: Note for the FBI , this may be the ultimate system for identifying faces, fingerprints and buildings! I would hate to think of the privacy implications of this.
Microsoft Adcenter let us know that they would be finally servicing the Irish / Euro market. Well done lads! .. I sent this request in 20 seconds after the live beta was launched! Nice to see you finally received the memo.
It seems that the future of search will revolve heavily around mobile devices. I think we have all been hearing this for the last 7 years so nothing new there. The solution was laid out fairly clearly. We need an ultimate mobile service to create a demand for the service. Think of it as the bebo, myspace or youtube of the mobile revolution. I mentioned all this before in previous comments on one of my posts. We all know the limiting factors of cost. What happens when demand overcomes the boundaries of cost.. Mobile providers are forced to change their business model to accommodate the consumer. This has been seen in the telco market with broadband and related services. I will follow up on this with another post.
Google AdWords Academy – Advanced Session
No comment, nothing really advanced here. Two prepped adword sales reps with a bag of we don’t knows and no comments throw in. Dave asked some interesting questions in relation to the campaign optimiser that is in beta. I will let Dave follow up on his opinion about this.
Click Fraud
In my opinion this was by far the most interesting seminar of the day. Shuman Ghosemajumder from Google described the fundamentals of how fraudulent clicks are detected. The worrying thing that I noted was that after the basic automated metrics where applied, fraud detection was a very manual process. Anything that is classed as “advanced” is outside the jurisdiction of the algorithm.
I hogged the Q&A time with a question about how a multi domain, multi account scraper site could drive low quality clicks through the adsense content networks. In my opinion this could be done not to make money but to drive up costs for competitors in your space. The guys basically noted that this is where advanced manual methods would have to be used. The answer I was looking for was “well don’t use the content network”. This was avoided by answering “you need secondary means to prevent fraud”.
So in summary the event was good but could have been better.. I took home some nice tidbits of information as a whole. As I said before, the best part of the event was the attendees. I think this is always the case, Faces to names and all of that.
