MBO Conference - Indianapolis

I recently attended the Masters of Online Business conference in Indianapolis and came bakc home with lots interesting ideas from usability to ppc management. It was a 1 day trip form Atlanta and apparently I was the only person out of town. The panel of speakers were great and I wish that I was able attend all of them.

http://www.getyourmbo.com/

Here are some bulletpoints I put together form the sessions I attended:

1.      Why “Set it Forget It” Doesn’t Work: Jim Brown (EverEffect - President)

 

·         Match Type Bucketing: Jim showed how you can significantly lower the cost of your keywords with smaller adgorups by bucketing Match Types and very targeted and Relevant Ads.  This is one heck of an advice  in the extremely competitive ppc environment to cut down their costs

·         Negative Matches: Jim was able to show the efficiencies obtained by simply separating match types and applying negative matches to each adgroup. It all comes down to relevancy of your ads to your keywords which determines the quality score and micro grouping with negative matches comes in place here

·         Creative Testing: Ever Effect advocates continuous testing and I picked up on a simple rule for the 2^nd phase of their cretaive tests. It’s called 80/20 rule which basically says that if you found your successful creative and want to re-test it against another cretaive, don’t risk 50% of your revenue by a split test. You can still keep the ads rotating and duplicate your good performing ad 4 times which will serve your better ad 80% of the time. 

2.   Designing the User Experience – It’s not About You! : Jon Arnold ( Tuitive - President)

This presenation was strictly on UX :

·         Personas : Create fictional characters as potential users of your website/tool    

·         User Modeling: Motivation, Expectations, Perceptions, Abilities, Flow

·         Prototyping (We got plenty on the Whitewalls in the office ) : Fail Fast!, Confirm Behavior 

3.      Landing Page Strategies to Increase Conversion Rates : Jim Cockrum (Web Geek Marketing – Consultant)

This presentation covered effective landing pages for predominantly Lead Gen sites.  

·         Lose the “submit button”

·         Avoid Google Slap: Coming from a Paid Ad, Google will look for content. Since lead gen pages usually have few information, they may get red flagged or get penalized by signifianctly high CPCs. There’s a simple trick to avoid the slap: Use hyperlinks Google will index the page accordingly, seeing that it’s not going to a dead page with no content

·         Keep the site above the fold

·         Follow up immidiatey : Jim gave some interesting stats on followup time vs. latency

·         Split Test

MBO Indianapolis was definitely worth every penny (even though paid by my company). There's a lot of talent out there and conferences like this help search engine marketing folks like me to communicate in person for knowledge share.