Search Marketing Expo Toronto

General Session Keynote Panel: – CHURCHILL B

What’s Next In Search: The Crystal Ball Panel
You’ve survived the economic meltdown, and now the search landscape is consolidating and transforming with seismic changes on both the paid and organic sides of the equation.

Will Google’s “caffeine” update radically alter the way you approach SEO? Will the partnership between Yahoo and Microsoft open up a new, viable alternative for search advertisers? Will privacy advocates succeed in enacting legislation that limits targeting options?

This is a no-holds-barred, no-subject-taboo romp through the hot-button issues with some of the sharpest minds in search marketing.

Media & Emerging Technology – CHURCHILL B

[MET-1] Getting Local Business Listings Right:

Beyond Google, Yahoo! and Bing, there are thousands of local business directories, alternate search engines and alternate Internet connected devices changing the way people find your business. The explosive increase in smart phone use allows people to obtain location-specific information on demand. How do small businesses take advantage of these opportunities? How do you manage enterprise business listing issues? What tools are available to automate the hundreds of updates required when your address or hours of operation change? For any business that provides products or services to a local customer base, now is the time to get ahead of your competition by taking advantage of comparatively low (or no) cost business listings, geo-targeted ads and other marketing tools offered by local search engines. At this session discover the complex, rewarding world of local business listings.

Search Analytics – WREN

[SA-1] What is Search Analytics and Why Should I Care?
Effective use of analytics solutions and processes significantly boosts click through, conversions, return on ad spend and dozens of other metrics that may be important to your organization. To benefit fully, you need to create meaningful action plans based on data.

Speakers in this session define and shed light on the growing discipline of “search analytics” providing case studies from their own successful analytics-driven search marketing action plans.

Media & Emerging Technology – CHURCHILL B

[MET-2] Search and Social Media: Insight and Inspiration

In this panel we bring together 4 thought-leaders in social media to discuss the evolution of search and the social web. We’ll look at how we can identify the ever-changing and expanding pool of influencers who flow in and out of the conversation. We’ll consider how best to capitalize on the synergies emerging between earned, owned and paid. And we’ll discuss how to leverage search to drive engagement, track attention and monitor conversations as they become more distributed across social platforms. Finally, we’ll discuss how to become more agile using real time analytics and search. Attend this session to expand your understanding of the challenges, issues and opportunities for brands and businesses in a world that is simultaneously becoming more search-driven and socially syndicated.

Search Analytics – WREN

[SA-2] Defining SEO and PPC Measures for Success
SEO and PPC campaigns offer unmatched opportunities for measurement, testing and refining. However, to fully take advantage of these opportunities we need to define the metrics, points of conversion, content consumption or actions completed that indicate success. In this session advanced SEM professionals will discuss how Success Metrics or Key Performance Indicators (KPI) are determined and show examples of how KPI are used both real time and historically to measure the efficiency of a campaign, the success of SEO, or the real time results of an integrated marketing program.

Media & Emerging Technology – CHURCHILL B

[MET-3] Mobile Search – A Two Part Session:

Part I: Apps and Opportunities – Away from your computer, but need to search for something? There’s a smart phone app for that! The App Store has given rise to a new digital ecosystem, says the New York Times (Dec 2009), with more than 100,000 apps for the iPhone, 20,000 and growing for Google’s Android and at least 2,000 for Blackberry. This session looks at popular search apps on different devices, how they gather data and opportunities they offer to search marketers.

Part 2: Mobile Paid Search Ads: Real Opportunities – Haven’t done mobile search ads yet? You’re missing out on a growing market! Mobile ad spend will surpass $6.5 billion in 2012, according to eMarketer. Google CEO Eric Schmidt has said that “mobile will be a larger business than the PC-web” – likely a primary reason Google recently spent $750 million to acquire mobile advertising network AdMob.

This session looks at mobile paid search options and how search marketers can get ahead of this tsunami of opportunity.

Search Analytics – WREN

[SA-3] Building Blocks for Success – A Two Part Session:

Part I: Structuring Paid Search for Success and Insights – Paid search success starts from the ground up. But over time, as investment increases, more diverse targeting is enabled, products and brands expand and the media landscape changes the structure you started with frequently becomes limiting and obsolete. In this session you’ll learn how to structure campaigns to align with business and marketing goals; and how to segment and set up for measurement, analysis and insight.

Part II: Unlocking the Toolkit: Enhancing Client/Agency Collaboration – According to Marketing Sherpa, more than 90% of search marketers are using an analytics solution of some kind. While marketers use solutions that measure website referral, activity and conversion from all online (and sometimes offline) sources, agencies use specialized campaign management solutions. These measure advertising impressions and click through (sometimes conversion) to help optimize for best results. Frequently, the client web analyst and the agency are not in direct communication, nor is access to each other’s toolkit enabled, often resulting in silos working at cross-purposes.

In this session, online marketing executives and search marketing experts discuss the benefits, challenges and process of unlocking the toolkit and working collaboratively.

Media & Emerging Technology – CHURCHILL B

[MET-4] Personalized Search – Times they are a Changing…Yeah, but when?
Google, Yahoo and Microsoft all appear to be experimenting with “personalized search”, an algorithm for serving up search results that considers an individual’s interests, search history and browsing patterns. In this session, SEM experts will discuss the impact of personalized search today and tomorrow on both paid and organic website visibility results.

Search Analytics – WREN

[SA-4] Post Click Behaviour and Landing Page Optimization
It’s easy to assume that the landing page you (or your boss) likes the best is best. But research conclusively demonstrates this is a false and a profit-limiting assumption.

In this session, we’ll not only look at what happens when you test alternative versions of landing pages with multivariate testing tools, we’ll also look at how improvements to pathways through content and links leads to dramatic (we’re actually talking 100%+ or more, according to Google) increases in conversion.


General Session Panel: – CHURCHILL B

Next Generation Agency: Search, Social, Viral, Mobile and Analytics
Search engine marketing as a profession came to be as a result of the Internet and people’s propensity to use search engines as a tool to navigate, find information, and establish communities and connect.

Today, we literally live with devices and tools that not only inform us; they connect us anytime, anyplace, twenty-four hours a day. The Internet, email, social networks, mobile and gaming have all made their way into our daily lives; concurrently the lines that divide TV and the Internet are blurring mounting another wave in the digital frontier. New business opportunities abound complete with new winners and losers.

Panelists explore this second wave and what it means for the next generation agency.