Agenda 2022

Google is well beyond being a search engine alone, it’s an entire ecosystem. So while we as an industry are talking about Google beyond search, many still report on success by only measuring SEO based on google/organic and CPC based on google/cpc. Questions such as how does social media distribution, spending on Google Ads or content syndication impact the Google ecosystem, are not asked simply because many Google experiences lack clear ‘line items’ in Google Analytics. So how do you track the value of all optimisations? And how can you, armed with this reporting, begin to optimise and understand connections between channels. Google itself seems to be trying to push us out of it, opening up more reporting for specific Search Appearances, Discover and News in GSC and their APIs. But when you look into this data there are often large discrepancies with Google Analytics data. In this session Jes will take a close look at all these questions and help you to convince stakeholders to invest into the Google ecosystem optimisation, rather than only search or paid optimisation.

On-page tactics, off-page tactics, technical SEO…we all know organic growth is not driven by one magical activity. But one thing is certain: If your CMS is not optimized for organic growth, the impact on organic traffic and revenue your team can drive will never reach its full potential. Don’t let your CMS setup hold your team back. Join Joanna Booth as she dives into CMS and its pivotal role in scaling your organization’s organic growth. She’ll look at setup, automations & optimizations, and how to get stakeholder buy-in to improve your results by supercharging your CMS for maximum SEO efficiency.  

No doubt, Google Ads is all about machine learning these days. Bid Management? Use Smart Bidding, there’s machine learning in it. Ads? RSAs will show the very best ads with the power of machine learning. Targeting? Broad match is now perfect thanks to, you guessed it, machine learning. While marketers are skeptical about promises like that, there’s hardly a way around Google’s black box solutions. Yet, common account structures aren’t exactly suited to leverage these solutions optimally. Marketers are torn between fighting to regain control and trusting the system religiously. So what will it be? Should we use SKAGs, STAGs, Fullistic, Hagakure – or is chaos plus machine learning enough?

In this session, we’ll take a closer look at what matters and what doesn’t when it comes to account structure. We will look at how to guide the system by providing the data it needs in ways that enable machine learning to draw the right conclusions while still being cost-effective. And we might find that marketing should play a much bigger role in search marketing than it currently does.

In the last few years, various announced and unannounced algorithm updates have had various degrees of impact. All rankings have been affected, but is there any consistent trend over time? Are there sites that consistently do well, or is it random noise? And looking forward, are there implications for where Google is headed? Tom doesn’t have a glass bowl, but he has access to massive amounts of data, which he thinks is better anyway. So get ready to question some assumptions and the industry consensus about what was and wasn’t important, and expect to be better positioned to read the next turn on Google’s wild ride.

Search Engine Marketing has always been a land of keywords, display a land of placements and YouTube a land of videos, but we’ve now evolved to the most pertinent targeting option: people. But changes to privacy are limiting what information we can see + use and this brings many questions and challenges. How will we deal when Google fully migrates to Topics (if they do at all)? What are the best ways to collect + use zero/first/third party data and when should you use ABM (if at all)? If you want the answers, don’t miss this action packed session. Aaron will also cover how best to personalize or customize your ad copy, and when it’s simply not worth it, and when and how to craft audience specific campaigns (with few to no keywords at all)!

There is probably no better expert when we talk about server side tagging than Simo Ahava. And he has agreed to come back to SMX Advanced because now it’s time to move on from the theory. So let’s talk about things like data enrichment, collecting raw data directly to a data warehouse, splitting data streams to help with GA4 migration, send GA4 data to Facebook, etc. After this session you will have a list of at least 10 things you can put into action right away. For this session you will need to have a solid base of the theory, so we can show you what you can do with the tech.

The promises of Performance Max are big: couple your deep knowledge of the products and services you advertise, including the best targeting signals, with Google’s understanding of real-time intent, and you can reach target audiences simultaneously across Google’s channels with just one campaign—giving you more time to focus more on strategic work instead of manual optimization.

Most advertisers have already made the switch, so it is time to take a closer look at results from this new campaign type. Are the advantages of increased automation a promise or a fact? Has Google become even more of a black box? Is Performance Max for everybody—or do only certain account types benefit? Pauline and her team have been using Performance Max from day one and have run extensive tests to find out where the gains and challenges lie. 

You will get insights and ideas (and perhaps some validation) about this new campaign type and learn about key developments as things are changing rapidly with more announcements and adjustments to come. This session is not to be missed, even if you’re a cutting-edge agency or specialist.

As the industry has grown and evolved, we’ve gotten more and more data. But we rarely put in the time to turn it into something more valuable, raw data never helped anyone. We’re going to work through the common SEO metrics and data sources and go through the extra work we can do to make them more valuable and make us less wrong and more convincing.

It’s tough to say which is worse: overspending or underspending. If you overspend, your client/boss will lose trust in the channel and see marketing as cost instead of investment. If you underspend, you can lose budget and more importantly, opportunities for profit. In this data oriented action-item focused session we’ll cover: Troubleshooting overspending budgets by checking for hidden budget busters including settings, duplicate keywords, and tangential auctions; Unshackling underspending budgets through structure audits including number of ad groups and targets, and bid to budget ratios; Scaling successful campaigns without tanking them through gradual budget adjustments, as well as how to calculate investment to return projections based on profit vs revenue.    
This session is best suited to practitioners who need to manage stakeholder/client expectations as we well as those in charge of marketing euros to understand why teams make the suggestions they make. 

As an industry we spend a lot of time creating content, or organising it with structured markup, or ensuring it is linked correctly. What happens when search results can be created on demand, in real time, in response to your query? Machine Learning has meant computers can create synthetic text content, understand context and complex links between different sets of data, or even create images from a description. With a long tail of queries out there, and users expecting search engines to cater to increasingly niche searches, is the time of the machines upon us?

Everybody is talking about GA4’s raw data as a solution to the immature UI, but only very few digital marketers and analysts know how to properly model data in a modern cloud context, be it behavioural like GA or other sources. If you don’t start this process with a proper plan and architecture, you will end up with chaos and tech debt 6 months down the line. In this session Christopher will introduce the Extract-Load-Transform pattern, the shift from dimensional (normalized) to denormalized data models and show you how to properly model all relevant PPC, SEO data sources and set up a sound project structure. This is a hands-on marketing data modeling best practices session for the advanced marketer, with GA4 at the core, but highlighting the need to create an abstract representation of all your source data.
Christopher Gutknecht

As marketers and advertisers, we spend time and energy crafting our content, our ads, and our messaging. We try to convince people to believe our stories, prefer our brands, click our listings, engage, and convert. But people are only part of our audience. Increasingly, they’re not even the biggest part. Maybe they’re not even the most important part. Because to reach those people – to gain access to an audience and a market – we need to first convince systems, search engines and social sites that our brands and our content are a good fit. We need to market to machines.
Schema.org gives us access to a rich language for doing that, but barely anybody’s going beyond the basics. They’re chasing rich snippets and fancy search results, but missing the bigger picture. To access tomorrow’s markets, you’ll need to level up your structured data game. You’ll need to understand how to visualize connected data, build sophisticated entity graphs, and think like a search engine.

Do you want to get low CPC clicks that convert for highly competitive keywords? If yes, then you need to learn how to combine the power of Google Ads Scripts and Google’s AI. In this session Nils will talk about the workings of the Google auction, the DSA algorithm, broad match and smart bidding and how you can use scripts to control their behavior to serve _your_ goals instead of Google’s. At the end of this session you will have a proven recipe to be profitable in competitive niches with high CPCs by generating low CPC clicks with high conversion value. And you can take your mature Google Ads accounts to the next level by uncovering growth opportunities that you thought would be unprofitable.

Success at the enterprise level requires a deep technical knowledge of SEO with a product mindset. In this session we will unpack the top 5 tactics to ensure engineers leverage and implement SEO correctly. We will review critical skills like refining SEO tickets, JavaScript discovery, and advanced AI and machine learning topics to scale SEO. Join this session and you will walk away with critical tactics to make technical SEO a success in your organization.

Traffic is the key to unlocking greatness when developing digital products or services. Producing high quality traffic is what makes a search marketer advanced and valuable for his company. However, data strategists are noticing that most search marketers put too much focus on raw numbers, which leads to disappointing outcomes (up to 80% useless paid traffic and a lot of wasted investments). So, let’s talk about how to put the horse before the carriage and not the other way around to generate good quality traffic. In this session, Lucy will address the most common challenges that data strategists and clients face when working with (paid) traffic. You will walk away with a list of strategic To-Do’s that will help the advanced search marketer to generate high-quality traffic that contributes to the overall value generation.

Almost every SEO is asked to forecast. It’s understandable – how can we ask someone to make hires, increase department budget, commit to a project, or take on an agency when we can’t say what they might get? The problem is – it’s really hard to predict what we might get from SEO work, and it depends on so many factors we can either end up with something that’s way too confident, or so woolly it may as well mean nothing at all.

In this talk, Robin will discuss some of the modern approaches to handling this problem. He’ll make a distinction between forecasting and opportunity estimation, and explain how we should use each. He’ll share ways to focus more on incremental growth, rather than just focusing on the simple totals that many tools offer. He’ll also speak about how we should be grouping topic opportunities (without reinventing the NLP wheel), and when we might decide it’s better not to rank with our website at all, but rather somebody else’s.

For the last 20 years, PPC agencies have had an advantage over in-house PPC managers due to technical skills. But in the future the scales might tip in the favor of implementing business data in how you work with Google Ads. This will come in many shapes, but as of 2022 this revolves around: Better ways of working with micro conversions, tracking blended ROAS, using profit data, using custom product scores or applying value rules for new vs existing customers. In this session, you will get flurry of ideas to how you can better implement data in Google Ads, which if combined with the right setups can help give you an edge over your competitors.

Waterfall charts are one of the most effective tools in your kit, but are underused by most SEOs. Sometimes SEOs don’t even know where to start when looking at waterfall charts of webpagetest.org. In this session we will change this. We will take you on a journey to some misconceptions that affect website performance, such as number and type o of connections, image and video implementation, effect of third party scripts, CSS or JavaScript. We will help you to capture relevant and insightful data and gather ideas on how to best share the results with developers and other stakeholders, to make an impact on the company’s performance culture, their monitoring and ongoing optimisation.

Have you ever heard an advertiser complain about their agency? Or an agency about their clients? Unfortunately, this happens all the time, and usually for the same reasons. That’s why it’s about time to share actionable guidelines to prevent unhappy advertisers and frustrated agencies. Based on a recent survey and unique data – not to mention, MANY years of experience – Wijnand will discuss with you:

• How agencies should pick clients and how clients should pick agencies
• What an ideal onboarding looks like for both parties.
• Things agencies do that delight and frustrate their clients.
• Things advertisers do that delight and frustrate their agencies.
• What activities can best be in-housed, and which ones can best be outsourced?
• Which pricing model best aligns agencies and advertisers’ interests? Hint: it’s not an hourly rate.
• Who should pay for technology fees?

Implementing what you will learn in this session will help you to achieve a great agency-advertiser relationship that lasts for years and where both parties get a great deal.

Working on internal linking does not only help Google to understand your priorities and what pages are about. It also helps with UX. There is no area of SEO more connected with UX and strategy than internal linking. So it’s about time to have a look at how we can develop better tools, thinking and processes to optimize internal linking at scale. In this session Johan will discuss better ways to think about main navigation, footer, pagination and differences between mobile and desktop navigation. You will learn why context is relevant but good links should not need context and what the biggest pitfalls are when working with pagerank.

Johan von Hülsen

There is a perpetual puzzle in PPC land; how can we truly evaluate the effect of a campaign and attribute conversions to the correct channel? Incrementality testing is a statistical approach we can use to measure the true impact of marketing campaigns including Social Media, based on two concepts; ensuring causality & estimating potential outcomes (by testing new campaigns’ causal effects). By creating control and treatment groups we can evaluate the differences in outcomes and estimate the causal effect of the test campaigns. In this session Alejandro will take you through the steps on how to can set up your own incremental testing.

Alejandro Jimenez Munoz

Building a new website in JavaScript has become the new black, but SEO-testing the new JS site while in staging is not always straight forward procedure. In this session we will look at a few tips and tricks of how to do it, so you can comfortably test a JS site while still in staging environment.

Each business has several personas: the searching and the buying persona. Many marketers focus mainly on the buying persona, when the searching persona might have a bigger influence on the buying decision. This is true for B2B and for B2C. So in this session, let’s focus on addressing these two personas individually to their needs by using social media channels to anchor the brand. Think outside the box! TikTok today has three times as many users as it did in 2019 – and the age group is rising, Instagram is perfect for collaborations with Influencers and has really nice Ad formats for interactive ads, Facebook lives for it groups etc. A smart social media marketing strategy should include many different creatives & topics like lifestyle, new work, childcare, work life balance, fit at work etc. By not playing directly on leads you can arouse much more interest in the topic, the product, the service. Want proof? Veronika does marketing for a company that sells software solutions in the medical sector and she will show you how to reach your target group with content that has impact on the target groups that matter.

What do your most valuable customers and employees have in common? They are LOYAL. There’s something else: they are HUMAN. We all spend far too much on acquiring new customers – advertising, marketing, social media, sales incentives, and more. A loyal customer doesn’t incur those costs, and is far more likely to do your marketing for you by recommending you to others. The same logic applies to your people – recruitment and training are the costly alternative to retaining your best team members. The key to a high-performing organization is understanding how our brains govern our behavior. Science-based business expert Roger Dooley will show you how simple changes in customer and employee experience can increase profits, reduce employee turnover, and cut customer churn.