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London SES – thoughts from Wed 23rd

by Nick Beck | 24.02.2011
I had the opportunityt to speak at SES this year – which was a great honour. Somehow I was asked to discuss Tracking and Attribution alongside the MD from VCCP Search. It’s not my expertise but my intro to the subject was well received (I hope!) – we will load up the presentation on our site next week in our search marketing news section. I had to rush home to collect my daughter but was still able to see 2 other presentations – here are my outtakes from the 3 sessions:

Attribution panel (myself and Paul Mead): before you decide to drop last click wins and start using an attribution model – ask yourself – and analyse the data – how long is your typical clients’ path to converion? if it’susuallty only 1 or 2 clicks – stick with your current tracking model. Don’t overcomplicate just for the sake of it. Eventhough the technology now is truly amazing for analysing paths’ to conversion and setting up attribution models – there will always be leakage within the system and it is still a bit of a fudge… attribution models are much more useful for products that have a long purchase cycle – if you’re selling t-shirts – don’t waste your time and money!

Retargetting panel: That search ignite guy is pretty impressive – as was the speaker from Banner. Top tips I picked up were: 1. use the cookie data you have – if you know they want a flight to spain definitely advertise that not a generic flight ad 2. Test your re-targeting window – one speaker found that the most efficient was to retarget only for 7 days after the first engagement 3. Don’t stalk – actually i knew that from when I was single…. 4.  swap remarketiong tags (illegal?) with a partner site that has a complimentary service 5. dont retarget to everyone who came to your site and didn’t convert – make sure they had some engagement such as they got half way through the application form, or they viewed 3 or more pages etc.

Biddable Media: again that search ignite guy is pretty smart – good at taking a concept and drilling down to what’s important – I only saw his speech before I had to go pick up Amelia. He made 2 good points – 1. the cool thing about display auctions is not the fact that they are auction based – search has been like that for a decade. The cool thing is that you are bidding on targetting an individual with all the cookie data recorded on this person – if they are your sweet spot an advertiser might be willing to pay 10 times what someone might pay for just a blind impression. 2. agencies are starting biddable media departments….. food for thought for all Search MDs…