Pubcon Recap - Day 1

Well, the first day of Pubcon is over and I survived. There is a LOT of people here this year, way more than last year it seems. I went to some of the sessions and the cocktail party so my head is still spinning a little. Here are some of the more memorable items for the day. I will be devoting some full blog posts to some of these later.

-This year the main hall/expo area/lunch area is in this enormous conference hall. There will definitely be no crowding issues this year, you could literally fit 10 football fields in there.

-Listened to the keynote speech from Craig of Craigslist. Nice guy, not the most dynamic speaker.

At the PPC sessions with reps from all the search engines a few interesting points:

-Google finally admits to the keyword insertion feature. Something we have all used forever, but they have never documented until now.

-Adcenter now has a certification program, just like Google and Yahoo. They have a training course and cert test to take, if that’s important to you. Search for Adexcellence for details.

-When pressed, Yahoo, MSN and Ask, all claim to have offline editors in the pipeline. I really hope so, but I am not holding my breath. For now we’ll still have to build campaigns with Google and convert.

-Lots of talk about dayparting. I don’t use it, but I can see the value of it for some niches.

-MSN is coming out with a cool Adcenter add-in for Excel that will do keyword research, reporting, and optimization. Looks like an awesome tool.

-I talked to the head Yahoo guy for a bit and asked when they are going to start allowing Geo-targeting of any other countries besides the US and Canada. He basically told me, it’s not going to happen any time soon. So if you wanted to target a campaign to the UK, you would have to open a Yahoo UK account. I told him they are kind if missing the boat with this lack of flexibility.

-MSN is really working on their quality score algo that they will be rolling out soon. It will focus on a lot of the same factors as Google, but be much more transparent, they say.

-MSN doesn’t like arbitrageurs. In fact, “arbitrageurs we just don’t want them” was the direct quote. Our job is going to get harder.

-Learned some good new tips to game Google’s quality score. More on that in a future post.

-Finally getting 1 free drink ticket is good. Getting 2 more extra tickets from the Webmaster World dude because the bar is about to close before the night session is great. Thanks!

Got any questions you would really like to ask one of PPC product managers? Let me know in the comments and I’ll try to ask it in the next couple days. I’ll also try to take some pics on day 2 - if I don’t forgot the camera in the hotel room again!

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5 Comments »

Comment by Sucker

2007-12-05 15:56:33

Bring on the pictures!

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Comment by Scott

2007-12-05 16:39:06

Awesome. Must be cool to be able to yell at the ppc directly. Ask Google why they keep slapping all my keywords to $10

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Comment by Shawn

2007-12-05 19:26:23

Thanks for the recap. I wish I was there Quick question:
What is dayparting?

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Comment by gopher

2007-12-06 02:53:52

Seriously, what’s MSN deal? Google can get away with their QS bs because they have volume, so everyone has to play ball. MSN on the other hand has only a fraction of the traffic, their Interface is a pain to use, half of your keywords/ads get disabled for some bs reason, and their bulk management features are a joke (who the hell decided it would be a great idea to set geo targeting on an adgroup level, with no bulk edit option?).

So yeah, could luck with it.

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2007-12-07 07:10:18

[…] Pubcon Recap - Day 1By ChadGetting 2 more extra tickets from the Webmaster World dude because the bar is about to close before the night session is great. Thanks! Got any questions you would really like to ask one of PPC product managers? …CDF Networks - http://www.cdfnetworks.com […]

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