SASCON is most known for their two day conference once a year but the organisers also bring a smaller version of the event, which is much more focussed topic wise and is only half a day. Last week SASCON organised an afternoon about mobile and local. (more…)
Next up on the coverage of the 2nd day of SAScon is a talk by State of Search’s very own chief editor Bas van den Beld, who talks about the psychology of search.
Bas starts of by showing a picture of his children, and then pointing out that this is the homepage of his browser – a Google search page with a custom background. Bas says that a lot of the things Google have been doing is about making search personal. (more…)
Speakers:
Richard Baxter, Founder / Director SEOgadget.co.uk @richardbaxter
Jeff Coghlan, CEO and Founder, Matmi @matmi
This was such an awesome session, that I have split it into two posts – first up – Jeff Coghlan of Matmi
A fascinating overview of ‘Gamification’ and how it is being used in ‘normal’ marketing practices to enhance, engage, and at the end of the day – sell more stuff.
On the second day of SAScon one of the sessions I definitely wanted to see was the Location panel. Chaired by Dom Hodgson from Emberads with a panel consisting of Laurence O’Toole from Analytics SEO, Netbooster’s Teddie Cowell, Malcolm Maybury from 360spin, and Google’s Chris Johnson.
After the obligatory introductions the first presentation is from Chris Johnson, who talks about local trends & ad solutions. According to Chris 1 in 3 mobile searches has a local element. He shows an example of a Las Vegas company who utilised their Google Analytics data to customise their mobile campaigns, resulting in strong improvements in conversions. (more…)
My next session at the 2012 SAScon conference is about mobile marketing and includes Richard Gregory and Ben Wightman from Latitude, Mark Kuhilow from MyMCart, and James Hamlin from Seatwave.
First up is Latitude’s Ben Wightman talking about the latest deveoplments in mobile PPC. Ben points out the strong growth of mobile in paid search clickshare in the past 6 months, correlation well with the release of new smartphone models. There’s a similar growth trend for tablets though it still lags behind smartphones. (more…)
The next SAScon session I chose to attend is called ‘Breaking Free of Panda/Penguin’ and features my good friend Peter Young from Mediacom and Holistic Search, and the original SEO rapper and Jason Statham lookalike Neil ‘SEOmad‘ Walker.
Peter kicks off by listing the issues Google is looking out for in web spam, such as cloaking, malware, sneaky redirects, link wheels, paid links, and many more of such tactics that Google disapproves of. Temporal spikes – i.e. link velocity – is also a big warning signal for Google’s web spam fighters.
Neil asks who in the audience has been hit by Panda or Penguin, and who’s received bad link warnings in GWT. The most hands go up when asked about Penguin, indicating the severity of this latest update. (more…)
Next up for me at SAScon is the Advanced PPC panel moderated by Yahoo’s Jon Myers.
First speaker is Duncan Fisher from Latitude and he’s talking about Quality Score (QS). The Quality Score of your keywords is a vital aspect of your AdWords campaign, ensuring only the most relevant ads are shown on Google’s search results. It’s a ‘complex mathematical formula’ scoring the relevance of your ad & landing page to the keyword you advertise on. From the advertiser’s point of view it helps determine how much you end up paying per click. (more…)
Here we are at SAScon, the Manchester-based search, analytics & social conference that just keeps getting bigger & better.
After an emotional introduction from Manual Link Building‘s Gareth Hoyle and Manchester Digital‘s Richard Hudson, we kick off the first day of SAScon with a big brand keynote session moderated by Richard Gregory and featuring Ben McKay from Moneysupermarket, Martin McDonald from Expedia, and James Hamlin from Seatwave. (more…)
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