On October 19 I’ll be moderating a roundtable on paid search at the Canadian Marketing Association’s annual Digital Marketing Conference. (It’s been held at The Guvernment nightclub — why that had to be the venue is an interesting conversation in itself!)
I’ve been asked to come up with three discussion questions for the nine experts around the table, and three “backup questions.” I’ll jot them down here so I don’t lose them, and to give panelists a handy URL for accessing them. Perhaps a useful bellwether of what people in the industry are likely to discuss at a high level, and in their general decision-making processes?
Main questions:
1. The elephant in the room: click fraud. Do you see more or less of it now? What are you doing to combat the problem? What are you doing to identify the problem?
2. It’s a new world, again. Google AdWords uses a complex “quality-based bidding” algorithm. Are you seeing changes in your accounts as a result? Do you feel that it’s increased the complexity of your job? Has it raised prices?
3. Yahoo Search Marketing question (TBD).
Backup questions:
4. What role do automated bid management technologies play in your strategy, if any?
5. Analytics: are you or your clients comfortable with using Google Analytics? If not, what else would you use and why? What sorts of reports do you find primarily useful and what sorts of reports might you want to access for more “niche” purposes?
6. Whether you work in an agency or in-house, does your company have trouble attracting qualified SEM talent? If you had success finding people, what was the trick?
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Andrew Goodman is Principal of Page Zero Media, a marketing consultancy which focuses on maximizing clients’ paid search marketing campaigns.
In 1999 Andrew co-founded Traffick.com, an acclaimed “guide to portals” which foresaw the rise of trends such as paid search and semantic analysis.
