Review Agenda 2019 - Agenda 2021 will be published soon

We know that Google says it wants to deliver websites with stellar UX (user experience) to searchers. We know some of the ways that they seek to do that, but there is also a lot of debate and controversy in this area. In this presentation, Will is going to bring together all of the things we know with things we suspect, and give you actionable advice on what it means for your search strategy.

In this advanced technical SEO session, Bastian will demonstrate why incorporating server logfiles and their evaluation into your SEO strategy is a very(!) worthwhile process. Many SEOs still underestimate the huge potential of log file analysis. However, especially when combined with web crawl data and enriched with data points from Google’s Search Console and Analytics, intelligent optimisation measures can be established on this basis. Bastian will present the best procedures, reports and tools for data interpretation and has a surprise in his store exclusively for the advanced SMX visitors!
Bastian will also help to answer the following questions:

• What are the “must-have” reports/dashboards that I should set up or use when working with logfile data?
• Based purely on the logfiles, how can you see which of your pages are particularly suitable for internal linking?
• Which software solution/tool is “the right one” for you/your team/your website(s) and what are the necessary requirements for a successful, continuous process?

Managing a few hundred ad groups is much different than managing thousands or tens of thousands of ad groups. You can’t look at the data for every single ad group when you have thousands of them. No one can write a million ads by hand. To properly evaluate and manage very large accounts, you need specific strategies for building accounts, and managing your data across large sets of search terms, audiences, ad tests and more. You also need to think about additional time and resource to manage the structure. In this session, Brad Geddes, probably one of the most experienced (Very) Large Scale PPC experts world wide will take a look into how large enterprise accounts effectively build and manage accounts at scale so you employ these strategies for your own accounts.

Optimising crawl budget and encouraging search engine indexation are concepts most SEOs are familiar. But the devil is in the details. Especially as best practices have significantly altered in recent years and will do so again with the introduction of indexing APIs by both Google and Bing. Should you control spiders with robots directives? Or optimise XML sitemaps? Or submit via the APIs? Or just let Google figure it out? In this session, we delve into the optimal way to get your content into search engines fast.

In this session, Christopher will show how cloud-based APIs and python libraries can help with ‘harder-to-solve’ PPC problems, specifically in the two areas of building search campaigns out of inventory data and search query data. Both automation tasks can be improved with a machine learning component, whether it’s a directly consumable API or a service that can be easily trained in the Google cloud. All use cases will be accompanied by code and documentation to apply it to your own PPC accounts.

On the other hand, there are plenty of automation tasks that can be solved with rule-based approaches, Christopher will share a decision framework to make that call. A basic understanding of Javascript and Python is not necessary for this talk, but helpful – essential is a willingness to get active in the field of PPC automation and start building your own tools in your team. Being in full control of your automation stack is crucial for 2019 and beyond. Machine learning tools are no longer reserved for scientists and engineers: they can be leveraged by any marketer with a basic tech understanding.

Google Cloud Platform (GCP) has impressive scale at a very affordable price. In fact, by simply utilizing the free tiers of its components, you can build value-adding components in the cloud, and produce data and results that are typically offered at a price point of thousands of dollars a year by proprietary tools.

Being a huge fan and advocate of the Google Cloud Platform, Simo wants to show you how simply by leveraging existing components and open-source libraries, you can very quickly build your own tools for auditing your website performance, for crawling the links and files of your website, and for storing all that data in data warehouses like BigQuery, ready for extraction, analysis, or visualization in Google Data Studio, for example.

This talk should inspire you to look at cloud computing as a potential future roadmap for how your organization approaches tooling and the subscription to SaaS services. The potential of GCP is incredible especially for those who take their website performance and search engine optimization efforts seriously.

We are so resistant to ads today that we install ad blockers, DVR our shows to fast forward ads and have developed banner blindness. But it wasn’t always like this. As a kid, most of us loved watching commercials. They were clever, fun, and most importantly not as omnipresent or intrusive. So how can you make advertising something people are going to want to consume? How can we prove to our audience, that advertising has so much value and purpose in helping us discover new things? With rapid advances in technology and consumer expectations, the result is that even average quality advertising will not pass. We need to get really, really good. In this session Purna will talk you through the concepts you must embrace to have a sustainable happy relationship with you audience – it’s time for some marriage therapy.

As we head into 2020 there are recent and upcoming browser changes which are going to impact SEO in a number of ways. Starting with the announcement that Googlebot has become ‘evergreen’, Tom will explain what you need to know about this, what is means for us, and what you need to do about it. Tom will move on to the  privacy-focused updates which are already impacting the accuracy of your analytics, and discuss what you need to understand that impact on your data moving forward. Finally, Tom will show off a couple of the latest features that Google have recently announced, and ask what this may mean about how our users view our web content in the future. You will come away with some actionable tips and some big picture thoughts.

Search term reports optimization can be a tedious process. A PPC Specialist will invest many hours do dive in into each campaigns trying to extract the most and worst performing keywords. In this presentation, we will share how the heavy lifting of the Search Term report can be automated and how technology can help to identify trends invisible to the human eye.

How can Progressive Web Apps (PWA) and Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) work together to create an optimal user experience, from search to conversion? During that session I’d like to focus on integrating AMP with PWA on the same URLs and how such implementation benefits users and search engines. Having both technologies/frameworks sharing a unique set of URLs makes search engines’ crawling and indexing much easier and straightforward. No need to deal with canonical tags, alternate tags and other signals to establish relationships between similar documents: there is only one document per piece of content.

I’ll go into the details of how to technically getting the best out of both worlds: the speed of AMP from the search results and the functionalities of PWA for UX, engagement and conversion. While keeping the site “SEO friendly”, in the mobile-first index context

Ad customizers let you show relevant ads that are tailor-made, depending on the user’s situation. They provide a powerful solution for both individually crafted ads and large-scale campaigns. During this session, Martin and Koos will walk you through the possibilities and opportunities customized ads have to offer. You will learn new ways of using ad customizers, including that one weird trick that might just take your ad customization to the next level. You will also walk away with insights on how to collaborate with multiple stakeholders and guidelines on how to incorporate this in your strategy. A session full of inspiration and activation at scale.

It’s tempting to think of “data” and “analytics” as something confined to specific roles in the organization (usually an “analyst” or “data scientist/engineer”). It’s part of human nature – we tend to emphasize the mandates of our job descriptions rather than look at the organization as something greater than the sum of its parts. This type of tunnel-vision is why silos are born, and why communication structures in organizations are so fragile.

In this talk, Simo will walk you through his theories and insights on how data is exceptional in that it doesn’t respect job titles, silos, communication breakdowns, or any other artificial barrier erected by human laziness. The data must flow through the organization, and it will, regardless of how many roadblocks people unintentionally raise in its path. Because of this, the quality of data produced and processed by the organization becomes a direct product of the healthiness of the organization’s communication structures and ability to break down the silos created by rigid hierarchies.

Simo will show you how communication structures have a direct impact on the data collected by the organization, and he will share methods from the agile playbook on how to break down those silos and start healing the relationships within the organization. This therapeutic session should inspire you to think beyond your job title, to develop empathy that breaks down stereotypes, and to approach data with humility and respect, in order to get data quality up to par with what the organization is truly capable of.

Dresscode: Business Casual

Google Data Studio is a useful (and free!) reporting platform, but most reports only scratch the surface of what’s possible. In this session, you’ll learn… yes it’s a cliffhanger and the reason is that this session is going to bring you up to date with the latest and most important features you need to know if you are an advanced search marketer who wants to take it up one level. And because the Google Data Studio of today won’t be the same Google Data Studio in fall 2019, we will update this session description only shortly before the event. Stay tuned!

Izzi and her team work inhouse on Local SEO for many of the Sixt 100 worldwide countries. As this is such a huge traffic and revenue driver for Sixt, they have many past and ongoing Local SEO projects. In this session you get rare insights and a true inhouse perspective, no matter at what size your local campaigns are. You will see case studies and advice regarding listing management, review & reputation management, working cross-department with operational staff, optimising with local features such as Posts, Q&As, etc. and a lot more.

Javascript is redefining SEO down to its roots. If Crawl Budget was one of yesterday’s most important optimisations, Rendering Budget is tomorrow’s. In this talk, Robin Eisenberg, VP of Engineering @ Botify, will show you how to own your JavaScript SEO analysis. Mapping on familiar SEO methodologies and adjusting for tomorrow’s SEO KPIs and methods, you will discover the tools and frameworks needed to understand what Google sees (or doesn’t see) in your JavaScript websites. A talk to prepare you to own tomorrow’s SEO.

A separate registration for this Deep Dives is necessary due to the limited places.

If you wish to register, please send an email to [email protected] and don’t forget to indicate the Deep Dive you want to attend. We will notify you until September 23rd, 2019 at the latest, if you have a space.

In today’s challenging marketing world, the ability to align messaging across channels, segment your best performing audiences and create cohesive journey-mapping from awareness through sales is critical for success. It’s especially challenging because getting it right means closely collaborating and coordinating with multiple departments and stakeholders. In this session, you’ll learn how to get in step with your customers (and your team) as they follow their own paths toward interest, engagement and conversion.

If content is king, are content aggregators emperors? Or are millions of documents with no original content a huge threat to your SEO performance? Learn about the specific challenges of huge aggregation websites such as marketplaces, classifieds sites and vertical search engines. Large scale SEO begins when adding a few lines of content just doesn’t do the job anymore. Scalable content curation, crawl budget optimisation, algorithmic internal linking and a quality-driven indexation policy are key to the success of some of the biggest multi-national websites of the world. Expect scalable and efficient best practises to optimize huge websites or help smaller websites to become one.

Are you running Google Ads campaigns along your customer funnel? Who doesn’t do that nowadays? But did you run into the problem of dealing with different conversion goals per campaign? You probably did. If you didn’t: this is about optimizing upper funnel campaigns for leads, middle funnel campaigns for micro conversions and end funnel campaigns for macro conversions.

Fortunately enough Google does have its own answer to that now. No more annoying fiddling with third-party tools or very expensive tools with Enterprise solutions – looking at your Search Ads 360 (formerly known as Doubleclick).

The answer to all your problems is: campaign-level conversion action sets. Ok, not to all your problems, but to some of them at least.

Dennis is going to give you exclusive insights how to utilize this new feature, which just became available in June 2019. He is utilizing conversion action sets to optimize campaigns for Homelike, a B2B marketplace renting out furnished apartments to business travelers. This deepdive will be filled with expert knowledge about how Smart Bidding with conversion action sets works, how to setup an optimal campaign structure and will compare the new method of setting these campaigns up in one account compared to different accounts in your MCC with shared conversions.

A separate registration for this Deep Dives is necessary due to the limited places.

If you wish to register, please send an email to [email protected] and don’t forget to indicate the Deep Dive you want to attend. We will notify you until September 23rd, 2019 at the latest, if you have a space.

Aleyda is one the most known SEOs in the international scene and she has been sharing knowledge for years. Now she has launched Crawling Mondays, a weekly video series. In this session you’ll learn from her experience optimizing her own Youtube video channel, sharing practical tips of the actions and tests she has done, what has worked, what hasn’t, the tools she has used and practical tips with examples to grow your Youtube’s videos rankings, views and engagement to help you achieve your video marketing goals.

We all know, Google Ads Scripts are amazing and a perfect base to automate your accounts. However, there are many limitations. But fear not – there is so much more that you can get out of Google Ads Scripts if you know how to combine it with additional services. In this session Marcel will show you some best practices, he and his team are are using to scale accounts such as Airbnb via scripts. He will show you how to use additional services like Google Apps Scripts to connect more data points, Google Big Query to store and process big data (including some machine learning features) and Google Data Studio to give scripts data a user friendly interface. And of course you will walk out of the room with at least two scripts, that are not even public so far, that you can use for your own accounts.

Accessibility experts optimize site code for screen readers. SEOs optimize site code for search engines. In both cases, we’re optimizing so crawlers can understand the content of page and the context of its elements, and oftentimes we’re optimizing the same tags. Accessibility optimization is a different ballgame than SEO, but when they overlap, how can we play well together, to satisfy the needs of both screen readers and search engines?

Optimized feeds and your Shopping & Text Ads combined will create a perfect environment for the customers to make a quick decision on the purchase. In this Deep Dive, Jacques will discuss how feed-based advertising solutions can be used to increase the ROI of your search and shopping campaigns and reach more potential customers with unique and customized ads.

A separate registration for this Deep Dives is necessary due to the limited places.

If you wish to register, please send an email to [email protected] and don’t forget to indicate the Deep Dive you want to attend. We will notify you until September 23rd, 2019 at the latest, if you have a space.

In contrast to scripts, the Ad(word)s API has always had an intimidatingly complex setup for PPC specialists. With Dmytro’s innovative approach via scripts, this is changing: you will learn how to access powerful Ads API features via the simplicity of the Ads scripts environment. With a step-by-step tutorial, Dmytro will walk you through the necessary components to get you started and show several hands-on use cases such as IP exclusion. He will also demonstrate cases that are not natively possible via scripts methods, such as price extensions updating, using 3rd party libraries in the scripts and other useful tips and tricks!

In short: in this session Dmytro will show you working examples, sharing how he works with Google Ads API via Google Ads scripts in his own accounts and which account structure you need to use all these new opportunities.

For many of us, a big part of our job is essentially to fix or improve things. We seek out marginal, incremental gains to make our platforms, brands and performance ‘good enough’, or at least, ‘less bad than our competitors’.

What happens when all of this is no longer necessary? When everybody’s website, app or software is perfect?

Google’s involvement with projects like AMP, Schema, and WordPress is changing the web. For better or worse, they’re standardising our ecosystem – and their momentum may now be unstoppable.

Few of our brands are equipped to compete – or even to survive – in this new world. We need a radically different way of thinking, and for many, it may already be too late.

After a busy conference it’s almost as enriching as the event itself to exchange knowledge over a cool, refreshing drink. Consequently, following the SMX Advanced Conference on the 1st of October, you are invited to the Peak Ace Headquarters in Kreuzberg, which are only a short drive away from the SMX Advanced venue.

Here you can participate in exciting conversations with industry insiders and engage in a unique online marketing battle in which selected SMX Advanced speakers will discuss a broad spectrum of controversial SEO and PPC topics. Be sure to make your voice heard by voting for the speaker who you think offered the most convincing argument in the challenge! Then enjoy your evening in the brand new bar area with drinks, finger food and music from a live DJ.

An overview of the evening’s proceedings:

6:15 pm – Departure of shuttle bus from the nhow hotel

6:30 pm – Meet & greet, first round of drinks & snacks

7:00 pm – Online marketing battle

8:00 pm – The afterparty

We look forward to celebrating with you!

Location:

Peak Ace AG
Leuschnerdamm 13
10999 Berlin