Agenda 2023

Management is demanding more ROI, ROAS and Growth. Online Marketing is changing faster than ever. In tough times it is more important than ever to become more resilient – as a team, as an organisation and on a personal level. In his opening session, Andre will present some hands on principles that help you to deliver better results with less effort.

You will learn:
– How and why demand is changing
– How organisations and teams could adapt faster
– Winning principles in demanding times

For years ‘keywords’ were everything in Search, and then came the rise of ‘the entity’. Tom believes that the time of the entity will soon be over, and will explain how Deep Learning ‘latent spaces’ are highlighting that entities were 1-dimensional thinking. The future of Search is going to be about context, and it isn’t far off. Tom will share his ideas for how you can prepare now, and get ahead of the competition.

CPCs and CACs are spiking across the board, while advertising giants like Google, Facebook & Microsoft are implementing more targeting options and automation while simultaneously removing many of the controls marketers have historically used to prevent wasted spend. This reality is a perfect storm that is will result in most marketers spending more and getting a LOT less. Given this reality (and the relentless march toward more automation), having a deep understanding of account structures – and how to leverage them to achieve your goals – has never been more important. In this session, we’ll dive deep into the essential account and targeting structures + how they can be used to prevent automation from running wild.

Ad customizers open up a lot of possibilities for savvy advertisers. Some of those are advanced and technical, others are simply to streamline account management. In this session, we’ll look into what you can do with customized ads. This includes obvious applications, such as creating compelling ads with dynamic elements, updated in real time. It also includes campaign structures and a few tricks that can make the account manager’s life easier.

After we talked A LOT about AI and the changes it will bring, it’s time to bring our focus back on what matters: E-E-A-T. The good news is that our tool and analysis kit has become A LOT more powerful thanks to AI and Big Data. So let’s dive in and learn from the one and only Lily Ray advanced tactics that will help you to improve your SEO by getting all these new developments into action.

Digital marketing channels each have their own strengths and purposes, but comparing Paid Search to Paid Social or even YouTube can be very difficult. Rather than determining which channel is performing “better” than the other, it’s more important to know how they can work together and fuel each other to achieve your overall goals and meet your ROAS targets. In this session, we’ll discuss the challenges of comparing channels and pitfalls for doing so, high level strategies to build a full funnel approach to generating customers, as well as a practice of regularly calculating your portfolio ROAS and how to adjust campaign tactics accordingly.

You are surrounded by fellow SEO experts and there is no better place to discuss and share our common problems. Off the record, and in a small group. These are your people – they understand your situation. Often rated the best part of the event, sharing your problems with like-minded professionals is your path to answers, a little empathy, and a stronger professional network. Come prepared with an issue you are facing, a problem you are solving, or a question that needs answering. And then, be ready and willing to help others to overcome their challenges.

Broad Topics for the roundtable discussions:

• Bastian Grimm: AI / ChatGPT
• Tom Anthony: Testing / Attribution / Data Driven Decisions
• Markus Hövener: International
• David Mihm: Local / Google Business Profiles
• Dominik Schwarz: All other topics

You are surrounded by fellow PPC experts, and there is no better place to discuss and share our common problems. Off the record, and in a small group. These are your people – they understand your situation. Often rated the best part of the event, sharing your problems with like-minded professionals is your path to answers, a little empathy, and a stronger professional network. Come prepared with an issue you are facing, a problem you are solving, or a question that needs answering. And then, be ready and willing to help others to overcome their challenges.

Broad topics for the roundtable discussions:

• Martin Röttgerding: Account Structures
• Fred Vallaeys: Automation
• Nils Rooijmans: AI / ChatGPT
• Elizabeth Marsten: Ecommerce
• Timon Hartung: All other topics

You have all been doing SEO for a long time, and you know and use the common KPIs. However, the more advanced you become, the more it becomes apparent that many of those are simply bad KPIs. They are not actionable, and one size does NOT fit all. In this session, we will look at the challenges that most SEOs face when defining KPIs, keeping in mind that different stakeholders require different KPIs. We will show you how to create a framework in which you can define your KPIs, including plenty of examples of not commonly used KPIs that might be the perfect fit just for you.

It’s nearly a year since the new wave of PPC automation rolled over us. We have talked a lot about how it will affect our work as SEM managers, and how the search landscape will change. However, we are now at a point when things have to get real. Because things have already changed. A lot! In this session Fred, one of the most renowned automation specialists worldwide will show you how you can gain an advantage over those relying on off-the-shelf solutions by training and customizing large language models (LLMs). If you want to push your PPC performance to a whole new level, this session is for you.

As SEOs, we optimize websites to work well in the search engines. Often this means that we get sites to be crawled more. But what is the environmental impact of what we’re doing? And shouldn’t we be helping our customers to be crawled less, yet more effectively? Do we even realize what it is that search engines are crawling? In his talk, Joost will guide you through the ridiculous crawl behavior of search engines and SEO tools.

Expectations are high, and there is a lot of hype surrounding GPT and its applications. In this session, Nils will separate the wheat from the chaff when it comes to GPT and Google Ads automation. If you are ready to learn how to use scripts for automatically putting GPT to work for your specific needs in your own accounts, then this session is for you. And Nils will even show you, how to use GPT itself to create these scripts for you.

We all use sets of tools to guide and inform decisions and decision makers when it comes to technical SEO audits. But what should we really focus on? Martin will use this session to talk about how Google Search evaluates pages on a technical level and what a good audit should focus on…and what is less important than you might think

We all love growing sales in Google Ads. Conversions, Revenue, Profit. But we don’t think enough about who is behind the sale. Was it a new customer starting the CLV-journey? A loyal customer who already knows your company? Or a sleeping customer who had forgotten you? Predicting and ultimately paying the right price for users in their stage of the customer lifetime journey, can have a big impact on your business. In this presentation, Marcel will show you 5 actionable ways to maximize CLV in Google Ads. See how you can calculate the value of customers in different CLV-stages, how to use new features to increase the value of new customers, weigh down the value of returning customers and activate sleeping customers.

Google Search is becoming more and more visual. The new “perspectives” filter, the AI snapshot (SGE) or Google Discover: Google is moving away from just showing a title link and a text snippet. Thus, you should have high quality visuals to have an above-average CTR to stand out from the other search results. What are the technical and optical requirements for visual snippets? How you can perform best in those new SERP features?

In today’s session, Philipp Mainka, Director of Digital Marketing, will explain how zooplus managed to implement a marketing mix model and use it for dynamic budget allocation. They started by building their own model using Excel and then professionalized it. In this hands-on session we will take a closer look at adstock rates and saturation curves and the open source marketing mix modelling package from Meta Marketing Science.

Keyword research and competitive SERP analysis, two of the fundamental building blocks of SEO, haven’t changed much in the last 20 years. But on the SERP, things are a lot more complex than they were in the early days of SEO. If you’re a company competing for search traffic where results are localized to a searcher’s metro area or neighborhood, it’s time to build a smarter keyword taxonomy. And it’s time for your site architecture to reflect that taxonomy. In this session, David will share his framework for that smarter keyword taxonomy and site architecture. He’ll describe the process he uses to taxonomize keywords (including the degree of localization and their position in the funnel), and how the results of that taxonomy inform changes to site architecture and on-page optimization to increase customer acquisition.

Cloud platforms from Google, Amazon or Microsoft promise the marketing world easy and quick implementation of data science projects. Does this promise stand or are things a little more complicated? Lennart and Maryam are already using Cloud platforms/ VertexAI for their projects and in this session you will get exclusive insight into one, conducted for a tour operator. Based on data from Google Analytics, session-level conversion probabilities were predicted by applying a classification algorithm. With the automated setup using Cloud pipelines, the daily calculated probabilities are available for audience creation. These can then be used with individualised offers, according to the audience’s position in the sales funnel, to achieve an optimised Search Ads campaign planning. If you want to take your search campaigns to the next level by using data and cloud platforms, then this session is for you.

When faced with challenges after an unsuccessful SEO relaunch, organizing your SEO data becomes crucial in overcoming obstacles and achieving SEO success. This session explores the use of SEO data to diagnose and address issues that arise during or after a relaunch, providing actionable steps to improve website performance and achieve desired outcomes. This session will feature the SEO-specific considerations around relevant data sources like Google Search Console, logfile exports, custom crawls etc, but also the technical aspects around organizing data models in a data warehouse.

Retail media allows retailers to monetize their digital real estate by selling advertising space to brands and advertisers. In the last 5 years, retail media has reached $30b USD in advertising revenue and is predicted to continue growing. In contrast, it took social media 11 years to reach $30B USD in advertising revenue and it took search 14 years. The wave of retail or commerce media has already hit the shores of the EU but it’s just getting started. The list of retailers fast mimicking with networks of their own in mold of Amazon is swelling – Tesco, Sainsbury’s, ASDA and Morrison’s in the UK to REWE, Lidl and Kaufland to name a few, have already launched and continue to innovate and are pushing to compete for marketing spend. In this session, Elisabeth, who is a regular contributor to AdWeek on retail media and works with media channels, such as Walmart, Target, Instacart, Kroger, Criteo Retail Media and more will go over the nuances of retail media, questions to ask, mistakes to avoid and how you can ride the wave instead of having it crash over you.

We all know how to optimize and tune our sites based on best practices and common sense. But do we really know how Google works behind the scenes? How does it decide what to crawl, index, and rank? How does it handle noindex documents? What can we learn from the leaked Google documents and the source code of Yandex, its Russian competitor? In this session, we will explore the inner workings of Google and uncover some of its secrets that can help us improve our SEO strategies.

With value based bidding, performance Max and even Broad Match, Performance Marketing is becoming more and more AI driven. In order to set your marketing up for growth in an automated world, it is important to optimize for data quality. Advertisers need to provide fast website experiences and offer a seamless user experience in order to fuel Marketing AI. Learn how to kickstart your website and improve data quality to boost marketing performance and understand, what keeps users on your site and what makes them buy. This session will explain how and why a great landing page experience is a combination of content, design and technical performance, and how you can use technology to make a user journey truly seamless.

During the core updates Google rolls out every year, SEOs often discuss the impact of vague concepts like EEAT, content relevancy and external links. Often the reason of loosing visibility is much more simple: Google interpreted a search query different, causing a shift in conceived user intent. In this session, Jan-Willem will share numerous examples of shifts, but more importantly, answer the question: can we act on it? He will discuss concrete examples of how to monitor, control and act upon widely rolled out user intent shifts. After attending this sessions you will have a good overview of what is happening, how to make changes to your projects and what to do to prevent unexpected impact in the future. 

You already know how to use Ad Customizer to create dynamically interchangeable, and therefore highly relevant, ads. It’s time to take Google Ads’ Ad Customizers to the next level. Imagine being able to create fully customizable ads based on your product data, and tailor different communication purposes with just a few clicks. Carina and her team have done exactly this. In this session, she will share how you can create ads that consist entirely of customizers, allowing you to adapt your entire communication with the push of a button, without losing any historical data or having to clean accounts.