Archive for July, 2008

Speaking at SES San Jose

July 22nd, 2008 by Richard Zwicky

Search Engine Strategies San Jose is always one of the largest and most intense of the dozens of search marketing conferences I attend each year. SES San Jose 2008 opens a month from now, and this year, I’ll be serving as a panelist on two sessions and the moderator of two others.

The first panel I am participating in follows the keynote address on Tuesday August 19. I am moderating the Measuring Success in a 2.0 World session starting at 11:00am. The panel is part one of Tuesday’s three-session series addressing search analytics as part of the Measuring Success Track.

This should be an especially interesting session because of the quality of the speakers. The four other panelists are people I’ve developed deep respect for over the years. Jim Sterne is the chairman of the Web Analytics Association. Matt Bailey is president of SiteLogic and one of the best speakers in SEO. Avinash Kaushik is an analytics evangelist at Google, and Marshall Sponder is a Sr. Web Analyst with Monster.com. Moderating this session will be challenging and the questions and answers session towards the end will probably be intense.

The next day, Wednesday August 20, I am participating in two more panels. The first session I present at on Wednesday is the Auditing Paid Listings and Click Fraud panel which is part of the Advanced Advertising Track. This is an important session that runs at most Search Engine Strategies conferences. For marketers running pay-per-click campaigns (and isn’t that all of them?) this session will give important tips on how to review your paid search traffic, how to spot abnormalities and anomalies in your click streams, and how to deal with click quality concerns.

Much later on the 20th, at 4:15pm, I will be moderating the Advanced Paid Search Techniques panel-and I’ll have to remind myself that moderators are there to make sure the discussion flows smoothly, not to make their own ideas front-and-center-as I have plenty of opinions on this particular subject. Luckily, our panelists do too; they include Jon Myers from MediaVest, Christine Churchill from KeyRelevance, Thomas Bindl from Refined Labs GmbH, and Andy Atkins-Kruger of WebCertain Europe Ltd.

The fourth panel I am participating on is the Best Kept Secrets to Search session on Thursday August 21. Made up of SEM old-timers, this panel is billed as a “…no holds barred interactive session in which veteran search engine marketers disclose some of their favorite search engine optimization and marketing tips, tricks and secrets.” There’s certain to be a lot of lively discussion during this session!

I’m looking forward participating in these sessions-and attending many others-at SES San Jose. Hope to see you there!