Precis representatives from Sweden, Denmark, and Norway have set out to participate in the annual SMX East (Search Marketing Expo East) in New York City – The World’s Largest Search Marketing Conference Series, as they state it on their website.
SMX East in New York City
Our main goal with attending the conference is to stay close to where things are truly happening within SEM, and a lot of the time that’s far away from Scandinavia. I personally hope to get confirmed that Precis is on the right path, learn a lot from global leaders within our industry and determine if American SEM agencies truly are further ahead than we are in terms of the services they are delivering to their clients.
DAY ONE – The Future Of Search
Day one was interesting on many different levels. Sessions around ad copy and ad testing confirmed that multi ad group testing is best for small data accounts. As we can rarely compete with US volumes, it’s important that we adapt models to fit our lower volume markets as the tools and techniques won’t reflect our reality otherwise. We will roll out our new internally developed ad optimisation tool to more of our clients very soon and it seems to be completely on par with regards to testing and optimising ad copy.
The most interesting session of the day in my opinion was a panel discussion on the future of search. Not the most immediately applicable session but it really got a lot of minds spinning, including my own. What implications does new technologies like virtual assistants in the form of M, Google Now, Cortana, Siri etc. and the recent retake on ad blocking spurred on by Apple imply on search marketers? What about platforms and apps circumventing the traditional search engines when it comes to looking for certain types of information? Life event discovery searches happen in apps like Pinterest and Instagram when users look for inspiration for weddings and home decor, etc. Users go straight to platforms like Amazon and Ebay to search for and buy products. Programmatic and predictability will take this to the next level. Not only will Amazon show me exactly what I’m interested in, they will ship the items towards my destination before I’ve even bought them. We’re facing hyper-personalization. Due to a shift in user behaviour, we’re experiencing more and more searchable moments in our lives. Search will increasingly be the way we interact with our different devices, however, the form will be of less traditional googling but rather searching through content. This will leap out of the screens and enter our lives with technologies like beacons and more.
But when will we actually see these changes?
It’s very easy to caught up focusing on the next smart technology but it’s all just inputs to a portfolio of campaigns. Certain actions will be more or less likely to be valuable for a company. Walking down a corridor near a store with beacons bringing Minority Report-esque creatives to life might be great at getting me to buy a product or service. Or maybe they won’t? It’s all about understanding intent. We see attribution being ever more important and Precis is doing a lot of research in this area. A recent example being a large ROPO (Research Online Purchase Offline) study examining how online behaviour affect offline sales for a large brick and mortar retailer.
After yesterday’s sessions, I’m definitely not discouraged about the future of SEM. On the contrary. Most importantly, I still have a very good feeling about where we’re heading – also when listening to industry experts in the most digitally mature market within our industry. Will be exciting to see what today brings.
