Review - Agenda 2021

Coffee Roundtables – grab your real coffee and share experiences virtually with your peers to explore the new and old challenges. Just like pre-show breakfast in a regular conference you’ll join a “round table” with fellow attendees and see where the conversation takes you.

Kick-starter: Share the impact the pandemic has had on your working environment, interaction with colleagues, management of projects and processes. Do you see digital transformation in your organization being accelerated as a result and what lasting effects do you think it will have on your career and working environment once the pandemic is over?

Today’s Core Web Vitals metrics are just the beginning. As Google continue to quantify and reward quality, your website will need to aim for perfection. But providing your users with a lightning-fast, error-free, accessible, secure, interoperable, future-proof, perfect website is hard, right? It doesn’t need to be. Technical SEO, web performance, and web development best practices are all solved problems. Building and maintaining a perfect website is no more complex than following a checklist and knowing the right techniques. In this session, Jono will walk you through everything on that checklist – from handling JavaScript frameworks to wrangling custom fonts; from optimizing image markup to utilizing edge-caching, and beyond. All in one session – to take home loads of actionable tips and inspiration!

Whether you do it for the users, or you do it for the ranking boost, many of us are worrying about improving our Core Web Vitals. But how do we actually know if our efforts are required at this stage? And where do we start?! Luckily for you, Izzi has been digging into hundreds of thousands of webpages to help you answer all those questions and more. Join her for a session crammed full with technical deep-dives and case studies, and you’ll leave with the right expertise to kick-start and maintain those impactful website performance and UX optimization projects.

Only a few years back we got very used to gain more data to analyze and work with every single year, but this has nowadays definitely taken a drastic turn, as we all know, due to “privacy changes” or Google’s “simplifications”, for example. Recently search engines started to push hard towards their very own recommendations, which soon might even get auto-applied. Are those recommendations rock-solid to the advertiser’s benefit, and should we blindly follow them? In this session, Julia compares the different options to get to meaningful optimization recommendations and why it’s essential to carefully pick the automation levers that are right for you and your business to stay in control over your accounts even in times where data points are taken away from the advertiser’s side. At the end of this session, you’ll walk away with a hands-on guide on how to find the best automation setup for your specific needs without having to rely entirely on Google. You’ll get access to an exclusive Google data studio based on custom BigQuery views that Peak Ace loves to use to stay in control over small to large scale accounts.

The process of building a new website is never easy and often involves many stakeholders and improvements and updates needed for the platform – all at the same time. The pressure is high regardless if the high demands come from your client or from your internal organisation. You can not fail to show progress. The new website has to be SEO friendly and must benchmark with competitor rankings or even succeed their performance. On top of this you have data that is almost never comparable with the old website and the universe you operate in is a constant moving space with new algorithm updates and competitive advantages. Sounds familiar? Then this session is for you. Sara will shed some light on how to avoid the many pitfalls along the way while keeping your stakeholders happy.

How can you combine Google Big Query’s builtin data transfers like Google Ads, Shopping, Analytics 4 and other data to build powerful analyses? When should you use custom ingestion pipelines vs data loader tools like Fivetran to integrate data sources? Which mistakes should you avoid at the beginning? How can you build your team’s SQL skills in an interactive way? Christopher will share some highlights and key learnings from his two-year journey at Bergzeit and share many practical tips, tools and code to test. Even though some data engineering work is needed, the key goal is to enable your team and maximize the time for analysis and insights, while keeping costs low. Data lifecycle topics like reporting, version control, observability and security will also be discussed. We hope that with this talk, you’ll finally be psyched to start collecting your own first party data in one place!

Meet the speakers, fellow attendees, sponsors, moderators – randomly for a quick chat, just like in real life. If you are a match you can exchange contact details with one click. If not, you simply move on to the next contact.

Over the last few months all the major browsers have added support for HTTP/3, which is an entirely new way for web pages to be transmitted to browsers. With HTTP/2 still rolling out, and many SEOs still haunted by the memories of HTTPS migrations, the idea of another change may be daunting. In this presentation Tom will break down what HTTP/3 is, how it works, and exactly what it means for SEOs.

Brad and his team are always running tests from ads to structure to bidding methods and more. These tests often change the way the account is viewed and managed. In this session, we’ll look at some of his favorite test results and the insights he found when examining tests and results. These tests should provide you with ideas and inspiration for what you want to test and learn within your own accounts.

Mike King is producing a film JUST for you: Get up to speed and learn all about the tech advancements in all channels and how use these to beat Google at its own game!

Coffee Roundtables – grab your real coffee and share experiences virtually with your peers to explore the new and old challenges. Just like pre-show breakfast in a regular conference you’ll join a “round table” with fellow attendees and see where the conversation takes you.

Kick-starter: Share the impact the pandemic has had on your working environment, interaction with colleagues, management of projects and processes. Do you see digital transformation in your organization being accelerated as a result and what lasting effects do you think it will have on your career and working environment once the pandemic is over?

Dan Petrovic from DEJAN will take you through a set of his latest experiments including creative/guerilla marketing, algo testing, CTR and more.

You have made a shift from managing one channel to managing multiple channels and now wonder how to allocate budgets. You know there are risks making decisions on last-click attribution – how to mitigate them? Media buyers challenged your approach of measuring facebook ads via google analytics last-click attribution. Instead, they started using facebook’s conversion data. How to align the team managing different channels? How to evaluate channels in apples to apples comparison? The finance team challenged current profitability levels of paid media investments and asked to get back with a model of what happens if we increase/decrease investments? 

Does that sound familiar to you? In this session, we will explore ways to set expectations on profitability targets and align them with the finance team. We will move from measuring averages to the last EUR spend. We will tackle incrementality based on methods available to all advertisers. And explore the journey towards better budget allocation.

SEO is far from being an exact science. Frequent updates, new technologies, and less-than-clear statements from Google mean that to master SEO, you sometimes need to get a little inventive. In this session Peak Ace co-founder Bastian Grimm will provide some vital insights into how to game SEO like the super-nerds do. Combining his knowledge of the ins and outs of technical SEO with some very surprising new results from the Peak Ace test lab (all we’ll say is: CSS content visibility/selectors, web components and shadow DOM), these are pearls of wisdom you won’t want to miss.

Real time marketing attribution attributes the conversion values during the purchase of a user and transmits this information via conversion tags to the relevant marketing tools. Sounds interesting? Then this session is for you. Patrick and Marcus will take you on a deep dive into data driven marketing attribution. They’ll kick off by looking at a selection of proven analytical methods for Data Driven Attribution which are often used to allocate the marketing budget between channels (cross channel). They will walk you through the optimization dilemma as operative marketing tools like Google Ads do not optimize their budgets (intrachannel) regarding the cross channel DDA results. The solution? Patrick and Marcus will show you a workflow using google cloud capabilities to enable marketing tools to attribute their budgets based on the whole customer journey. 

With the advent of new technologies and the massive use of Javascript on the internet, search engines have started using Web Rendering Services to better understand the content of pages on the internet.What are the difficulties in building a WRS? Are tools we use every day replicating what search engines do? In this session, Giacomo will drive you on a discovery journey digging in some techy implementation details of a search engine like web rendering service building process, covering edge cases such as infinite scrolling, iframe, web component, and shadow DOM and how to approach them.

Google is becoming a machine learning driven black box. Most companies still focus on ROAS as the main KPI – WRONG! Relying only on Google’s Algorithms and trusting the data that Google and Facebook feed us is becoming one of the main problems with performance marketing in 2021. Gianluca would even go so far to say that Google Ads – Performance marketing in general – is about to collapse. So how do we spare ourselves from “disaster”? In this session, Gianluca will show you a different and new approach that drives better decision making and is not based on believing in third party data, so you can take the lead and have an edge over the competition to move faster in the market. How is this possible? Leveraging your first party data and pushing this data back in the acquisition channels.

We all know the issues – cross functional dependencies, C-Level don’t understand SEO, SEO teams under pressure to show results yesterday. How do you handle it?

This session will give you powerful tips for managing upward, enabling cross-functional alignment, and reporting on progress (the right way). Join our experts in this jam-packed session!

Google Ads Advanced Optimisation Tools (Tom Price)
You are an advanced Google Ads user? You have your tool kit in place and it’s working well? Great! Then it’s the perfect time to raise the bar and increase your ROI. In this session Tom will cover tips and tricks for optimising offline conversions, improving landing page performance and using 3rd party audiences with tools you might be using already and tools, you have not come across before. He will also provide a downloadable checklist to survive in a post cookie world.

Shopping becomes increasingly competitive while Google’s automation technology becomes increasingly widespread – and less controllable. This leads to diminishing returns and intense pressure on advertising budgets and revenue streams. Brands & retailers who are stuck in the middle will suffer death by a thousand cuts (or ad clicks).

In this session you’ll get an advanced guide to aligning Shopping with business objectives, ranging from inventory management and pricing strategy to customer acquisition and market share. This includes the best approaches to data integration and product scoring, plus sophisticated profit measurement concepts. You’ll leave this session with proven actions for increasing competitive differentiation and achieving healthy growth, with project recommendations that can extend far beyond Shopping.

Learn about this new search engine: Petal Search, that has been launched in +170 countries and is available in +50 languages with +200 rich result cards and ready with standard SEO/SEM tools. We will guide you through a discovery journey reviewing capabilities ranging from organic traffic, paid traffic as well as disruptive features, support tools and how to integrate seamlessly. We will also show some use cases from partners already engaged. Try out petalsearch.com from your mobile phone today!

Choose the topic that is relevant to you. In every hub we offer SEO and PPC focused topics to dig in deeper into the content you have seen at SMX Advanced. So this is the perfect opportunity to share your story, your specific question and get first hand advice from your peers and experts.  All hub and virtual attendees can participate in the roundtable of their choice and it’s a camera on event.

• Everything is automated, everything feels the same! Creative strategies and ideas to make a difference in a fully automated ad world (Martin Röttgerding)
• Challenges and solutions for international PPC campaigns (Julia Thoenes)
• Indexing: the biggest challenge for E-Commerce in 2021 (Bartosz Góralewicz)
• Page Experience Optimization: how to establish and measure holistic quality beyond core web vitals (Nicole Treipl)
• How to build (and maintain) a perfect website – a roundtable discussion with keynote speaker Jono Alderson

Don’t hold back. This is the time to ask YOUR questions about Google’s Core Web Vitals. And this wouldn’t be SMX Advanced if we didn’t the top experts aligned to bring you the answers. Want to tell us your burning questions in advance? Even better – send us an email and we’ll pass it on the people who have the answers (NB: only registered attendees can submit questions)

In this geek level session Dmytro will show you capabilities and working examples of scripts that aren’t known to many marketers. You will learn how to work with large accounts and resolve problems, how to use external libraries in Ads scripts and much more. You will be taking away hints, tricks and hidden features of Google Ads scripts ready to use when you get back to your office. Dmytro is a marketer, who writes his own scripts, however for this session a basic knowledge of Javascript and Ad scripts is required.

The search and advertising eco system has been shaken up in the last 15 months. There are many winners but also many losers in a scenario that was wilder than any of us would have ever expected. It’s been a ride of resilience, inventive genius, adaption and change. So where do we go from here? Philipp Klöckner is known for his sharp and holistic view of the industry. How could we better close this SMX Advanced Europe than with his view on where we are today and which trends will be the ones to embrace?