On June 25th, Elite SEM employees flew in from all corners of the U.S. for Elite SEM’s company-wide retreat “Fun Week.” The entire company took 3 days off for a week filled with learning and fun. To kick-start Fun Week, the Elite SEM team attended our very own Google Agency Training Day Summit hosted by our Google leads.
For those of you who read the above and are thinking of being stuck in a room for hours learning about topics that they feel they may already fully grasp, you all should think again!
This specific Elite SEM agency seminar was a highly valuable experience that gave the entire Elite team insight into new and upcoming AdWords features, the future of search, and the future of the industry. After speaking to several Elite colleagues, we’ve compiled the following top key takeaways from the seminar to share with our blog readers and clients:
Search Takeaways
- Utilize the Google Auctions Insights Report to get a better grasp on your competitors and make more informed, strategic decisions.
- Ad Extensions betas and other additional betas will be launching throughout the year
- Test new campaign types, extensions, and betas and measure the effectiveness these tests have on the key metrics for your campaigns.
- Google Trends is a powerful and often overlooked.
- It can be great for analyzing trends or patterns within the market place or amongst competitors
- Overlaying Google trends data with performance data can often times provide powerful insights.
- Enhanced Campaigns will have depth and complexity.
- It will be important to master layering bids for geographic targeting, device targeting, and taking advantage of the other, upcoming features that roll out with Enhanced Campaigns.
- Learn to leverage your Google and Yahoo/Bing agency teams.
- These teams have internal reports unavailable to the public and can better help to understand the “big picture”
Factors that impact search
- The continued growth of mobile and the changes constantly occurring in the mobile space influence today’s society.
- There are common, overlooked external factors that influence the search and display vertical.
- Learning how to leverage and identify this data and these trends can help you not only maximize performance but also explain trends and changes.
- As an exercise try and look at search not just from a marketing stand point, but holistically as well.
- Search is such an integral part of our daily lives, what are people searching looking for and how can we help provide that for them?
The Future of SEM
- The future of search is in product feeds and all other feeds.
- Knowing who to partner with is crucial.
- The cookie is the “new keyword”
After the Google Agency Day Summit we enjoyed some company bonding over happy hour in the meatpacking district, and prepared for the next day’s Elite SEM retreat in Montauk.
There’s no doubt with the success of this event, Elite SEM’s Google Agency Day will be one of the many great events we continue to have year after year.
