SES NY Day 2 Highlights - New Google AdWords Interface!

 Last night I made it home from NY after attending the SES NY Conference. I did learn quite a bit, made many new contacts and got to eat some good food. So I'd say it was a worthwhile trip.

SES NY Day two included a good mix of topics. I decided to start off the day with Social Media Marketing for Brand Building that was presented by ClickZ.com. It was pretty cool that I got to meet some of my favorite authors from the online publication including Hollis Thomas, founder of WebAdvantage.net, who I always try and follow. She spoke some more about Twitter and added a few new insights not covered by Guy Kawasaki yesterday. Harry Gold from Overdrive Interactive focused his presentation mostly on Facebook and gave us some good examples of some of his clients that have been successful there including Harley Davidson. Dave Evans from Digital Voodoo started off this panel with a good overview reminding us to use integration in social media as we would with other mediums.

The highlight of my day though was the next session that was an introduction to the new Google AdWords Interface. I knew it was coming, but I hadn’t seen it yet. Ariel Bardin from Google gave us a demo and showed off some of the new features that got some applause from the room. Two main design principals Google was following with this update is speed and consistency. They want us advertisers to be able to do our job more efficiently and be able to optimize our campaigns quickly. So overall it’s much more interactive and eliminates the need to have to navigate to a new page, therefore eliminates the time it takes for a new pages to load. Depending on the size of your campaign, sometimes this can really slow you down.

So I went over to the Google booth later and logged in to my account and they put me in the queue to switch to the new interface. Right now it’s still in beta and their philosophy is to go with a “rolling release” which means there will be some bugs. They stressed that they’re looking for feedback and are using the SES NY audience as a key target for this. They aren’t switching the My Client Centers over quite yet, just individual accounts. So I’ll play around with it now that I'm back and see how it performs.

I took a break from the conference that day and met an associate around the corner for lunch at a trendy mid-town, Italian restaurant called Remi. We had a great lunch, but the real thrill was having Sam Waterson, who plays Jack McCoy on Law & Order sitting right across from us. Being a Western-NY girl who normally doesn’t see celebrities around town I tried not to stare. However, I probably did a bit. He is a very distinguished looking gentleman.

Unfortunately I just caught the tail end of the Orion Panel when I got back to the conference which was on the State of Search, so I can't really comment on it (and I didn't hear much chatter about it either, so I may not have missed much).The afternoon sessions were a bit of a disappointment. Facebook took the grand ballroom and turned it into an mid-afternoon nap session. I thought we might hear more about the new Pages update status change feature, but instead it was only about how to create Facebook ads. We really didn't need a whole 75 minutes to show us a simple interface tool.

The last session of the day I attended was sponsored by Google and entitled Maximize Your Website's ROI. Alex Torres, Product Marketing Manager for Google Enterprise seemed liked a pretty sharp guy, but the session was mostly a sales pitch on Google products and how they're all integrated: AdWords, Analytics, Optimizer, SiteSearch.

The evening made up for the afternoon with a great dinner at an upper East Side Italian restaurant with some family; my sister-in-law Virginia and nephew Nick who live in the neighborhood, and my daughter, Kelsey, the NYU Freshman.

Now I promise to write one more post regarding Day 3 which will be mostly centered around John Gerzema's opening keynote that I really enjoyed (and Twittered my way through). So stay tuned.

Comments

[NIck]

I would tell that Google is stepping ahead to provide you a single bit of tool for every purpose. But the google keyword tool is somewhat like piting up on it. I have used this in past with another tool from serp analytics but found some broad results from google. So i throw it off and now only using only tool from serp analytics and it can be found here http://www.serpanalytics.com/tools/top_keywords

:)

[Carrie Cain]

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