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Hero Conf Los Angeles 2017 Takeaways

Group Picture at Hero Conf

I recently had the privilege of attending Hero Conf from April 17-20 in Los Angeles. Organized by Hanapin Marketing and hosted bi-annually, it’s the world’s largest PPC conference. I met a number of PPC advertisers across North America and attended a variety of sessions ranging from Adwords scripts to landing page conversion rate optimization.

I had never been to a marketing conference before, so I wasn’t sure what to expect. While I learned about many topics, there were two in particular that I wanted to apply to Adster’s PPC program.

Paradigm Shift: From Keyword to User Context

I loved Brad Geddes’ presentation on audience targeting strategies and how we could treat them differently based on where they are in the marketing funnel.

For example, the intent of someone searching for something general such as “denture implants” is much different from the intent of someone searching for “mobile denturist that does denture implants in south edmonton.” The former may still be in the investigative stage while the latter could be ready to book an appointment.

“If you’re only remarketing to people who abandon shopping cart, you’re missing the point.”

Brad went on to explain remarketing strategies available for different segments of users (new users, previous customers, abandoned cart users, offline customers etc.) and how attribution models are important as we see more comparative shopping and users who take four, five, six visits before they buy.

A lot of what he presented made sense to me and I’m excited to bring those strategies to Adster!

PPC and SEO Working Together

A crowd favourite, Wil Reynolds from Seer Interactive did a presentation on how PPC and SEO can (and should) work together. He emphasized the importance of content continuity. Does your ad’s unique value proposition match that of your website’s meta title and landing page content or is there a disconnect there? In terms of using PPC for SEO, Wil mentioned that if you’ve been split testing ad copy for a while, then you can use the ad copy that boasts higher clickthrough rates in your meta titles and meta descriptions to achieve better clickthrough rates in organic.

Don’t Hit Enter: He included a great tip to see what some popular Google searches are related to the term you are searching for by turning off Google Instant. Instead of populating search results right away, Google gives you a list of up to ten suggestions of what you may be searching for. You can then ensure that you’re addressing those terms in your ad copy, meta titles and landing pages. We’ve implemented the tip at Adster and we’ve found that “Don’t Hit Enter” has taken Adster’s blog research to a whole new level!

All in all, I learned much more than I could fit into this blog post, but I’m excited to use what I learned to push Adster’s online marketing program even further.