Pulling Ads from Google: Smart Move or PR Stunt?

Recent headlines and Tweetstorms about Google ads—specifically ads on the Display Network and YouTube—appearing alongside potentially offensive domains or videos have caused an increasing number of globally recognized brands to pull their whole Google advertising budget. Take Pepsi, the latest domino to fall, for example; they “just pulled all ads from Google and YouTube.”

While this creates the illusion that these brands are doing “the right thing,” it’s little more than an ill-informed, feel-good PR stunt.

Here’s some potentially shocking information: Google is a search engine, a smart advertising company, and a bastion of innovation. It is not a moral compass.

As such, there are websites on the Google Display Network and videos on YouTube that may very well offend or upset some people. It makes sense for Google to cast as wide a net as possible: a broader network of websites running AdSense and videos bookended or interrupted by ads means more revenue. Inevitably, this net will scoop up driftwood, garbage, and the occasional body part. 

However, since advertisers pay for clicks or impressions, and Google cares about its customers continuing to pump billions per annum into advertising, it behooves Google to give advertisers some measure of control over where their ads are shown.

In fact, these controls have existed for some time now; you just have to know where to find them.

By simply dropping all of their Google ad spend on principle, these brands are going to lose out on valuable advertising opportunities that, for the most part, would have had limited affiliation with any kind of offensive content. For “limited” to become “zero,” all it takes is an understanding of negative placements and content exclusions.

How to Prevent Your Ads from Appearing on Offensive Content

If you feel there are websites or YouTube channels that don’t align with your brand, you can eliminate them from your campaigns with ease.

Here’s how.

Google Display Network: Negative Placements

 

There are two ways to eliminate websites that trade in offensive content from your GDN advertising strategy. The first involves making sweeping changes to the types of website eligible to display your ads using “Site Category Options.” The second involves curating a list of custom placements that you’ll add as campaign-level exclusions.

The easy, catch-all way

You, too, can cast a wide net.

By using site category exclusions, you can negate websites that Google has identified as fitting into one or multiple categories from your Display campaigns. You can find this option at the bottom of the Display Network’s “Placements” tab.

 

While this isn’t going to eliminate all potentially offensive websites, content, and placements that your banner creative might appear near, it’s an excellent start.

The #granular way

If you already know there are specific websites you’d like to avoid, there’s no need to leave their exclusion to chance.

 

Negating specific website is like the bizarro version of Managed Placements. All you need to do is enter a single site (or list of them) in the field depicted above and Google will stop showing your ads there. You can leverage placement exclusions across all Display and Remarketing campaigns, ensuring your ads avoid any content that exists in opposition of your brand’s mission.

YouTube: Content Exclusions Settings

Today, the ability to control the types of videos your ads are shown on is more limited that the controls available to advertisers on the GDN; per Google, that’s going to change soon (more on that in a moment).

 

For now, advertisers making use of pre-and-midroll creative can adjust their content exclusion settings from the default, “all content except mature and unlabeled content” to the more discerning “all content except mature, unlabeled, and sensitive subjects.”

Again, this isn’t a perfect solution; it’s ostensibly the YouTube version of site category exclusions.

Coming soon though…

Google’s New Expanded safeguards

Starting in Mid-March, Google rolled out a suite of advertiser-focused measures they’re calling them “Expanded Safeguards.”

Per Google, these changes will make it easier for advertisers to control when and where their ads are served. Google aims to establish a “safer default for brands,” adjusting automatic settings to make site and YouTube channel exclusions easier. This means companies can balance morality and business growth without feeling compromised.

In relation to video specifically, there’s talk of tightening safeguards and making it easier for advertisers to eliminate offensive content placements. Google’s also taking a hard look at what kind of content (paid or otherwise) should be allowed to exist on YouTube.

It’s also worth noting that brands can opt into the original, broader audiences if they choose.

Mark’s Take: Eliminate Bad Placements, Not You AdWords Account

When the first wave of advertiser backlash began back in November, our resident data scientist Mark Irvine wrote about excluding ads from certain sites. When asked to touch on brands pulling their ad spend from Google, here’s what he had to say:

 “A few months ago we began to notice that clients became more selective in how they bought programmatic ads. Before November, our clients didn’t think twice about their ads appearing across 1 million different sites (in fact, that was considered a value prop). Over the past few month, though, about 40% of our clients have asked about removing different controversial sites and content categories from their targeting. Google’s ad inventory is large enough that removing 1 domain or one category of domains doesn’t strictly limit your reach on the platform nor does it reduce spend.”

In short, the GDN and YouTube are so large that eliminating one or even a whole industry’s worth of websites and video will have no discernable impact on your advertising.

In Conclusion

If you implement negative placements and content exclusions, you can continue using AdWords with a clear conscious and without passing on valuable prospects and brand-building opportunities. No gestural morality needed.

Moving forward, Google’s promise to provide more in-depth reporting on video ads. They’re developing tools and throwing money behind new measures to improve their ability to identify questionable content, and escalation procedures to fix issues that slip through the cracks in “less than a few hours.”

About the Author

Allen Finn is a content marketing specialist and the reigning fantasy football champion at WordStream. He enjoys couth menswear, dank eats, and the dulcet tones of the Wu-Tang Clan. If you know what’s good for you, you’ll follow him on LinkedIn and Twitter.

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New Facebook Ad Benchmarks & More Top Stories from March

We have made it through the ides of March, losing an hour of sleep (though it felt like 5 hours), and winter storm Stella. Though the temperature in Boston remains at a tepid 40 degrees, spring has sprung and brought along some nice allergies…we are ready for April!

Here are our best posts from March in case you missed them while out stocking up on milk and bread prepping for a spring blizzard or forgot to set your clock forward an hour.

1. Facebook Ad Benchmarks for YOUR Industry [New Data]

So, we might be cheating here a little bit since this was published on the last day of February but we want to make sure you don’t miss it! Our data scientist, Mark Irvine, pulled together a comprehensive list of all important performance metrics on Facebook based on industry.

2. How to Use Google AdWords [Infographic]

With some fantastic analogies between AdWords and college life, Allen Finn brings you a simple but thorough infographic illustrating how to use Google AdWords for your business. Get to the top of the class with this proven path to AdWords Success!

3. 10 Ogilvy Advertising Secrets that Still Work in 2017

David Ogilvy literally wrote the book on advertising, a work that continues to be relevant 30 years later. This post reveals the most important secrets that are alive and well in 2017, and how to use them to your advantage. Best part? Brad Smith included some great quotes straight from the book, which give us a window into Ogilvy’s straight-forward manner—without actually having to read it!

4. 7 Little-Known, Research-Backed Lead Generation Ideas Revealed

This post outlines some lesser-known lead generation marketing ideas that actually work. These will arm your marketing team with new and creative ideas to kick-start gathering leads.

5. Exact Match Keywords No Longer Exact Match

Staying on top of industry news is our specialty, and Mark Irvine never lets you down. On St. Patrick’s day, Google announced changes to keyword match types, especially affecting exact match. This post outlines exactly what you need to know and do to remedy your account after the change.

6. GIFs Will Revolutionize Your Facebook Ads – Here’s How to Use Them

Thrillingly, Facebook began allowing advertisers to use .gifs in ads starting in February. Not only will this spice up your newsfeed, Allen Finn outlines why .gifs are a big deal and how to use them effectively.

7. 37 Staggering Video Marketing Statistics for 2017

Digital marketing is turning more toward video marketing this year—we compiled are some statistics about video that might shock you!

8. NEW Display Location Extensions & Ads: Drive More Local Business

As search intent continues to become more local, Google released new display location extensions to show your local business address beneath your ad. Mark Irvine explains how this can be used effectively!

9. Why Brand Advertising Drives More Conversions than You Think

If consumers have never heard of you, they aren’t going to be searching for your brand. In this post, Larry explains why brand advertising is so important and how to start branding your company.

10. OK, Google: How Do I Optimize My Site for Voice Search?

Voice search is changing the way Google handles search queries, how we search, and our attitudes toward search in general. Dan Shewan dives into what makes Google voice unique through its history, and how to develop content that is primed for voice searches of the future.    

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Minimum Viable SEO: If You Only Have a Few Minutes Each Week… Do This! – Whiteboard Friday

Posted by randfish

Even if you know — deep down in your heart of hearts — how important SEO is, it’s hard to prioritize when you have less than 3 hours a month to devote to it. But there’s still a way to include the bare minimum, even if you run on a tight schedule. In today’s Whiteboard Friday, Rand covers a minimum viable SEO strategy to give those with limited time a plan going forward.

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Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high-resolution version in a new tab!

Video Transcription

Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week, Minimum Viable SEO. So if you only have a few minutes in a month, in a week to do some SEO, and I know many of you are professional SEOs, but you work with lots of folks, like content creators, clients, web developers, who have very, very limited time, what I want to try and do is provide a path for you of “do this if you have no other time in the week to do your SEO.”

So let’s say here’s my calendar. It’s February, so 28 days. Start of the month, you have an hour to give me, sometime in the first week of the month. It doesn’t have to be, but that’s a great way to go. At the start of each week, I’m going to ask for 10 minutes just to do a little bit of planning, and then each time you publish content, a very, very small amount of time, just 3 minutes.

I know it sounds hard to believe, but you can get a fair amount of solid SEO work. Especially if you’re in an industry that is not hyper-competitive or if you’re going after the right kinds of keywords, that aren’t super competitive, you can really make a difference. If you’re building up a lot of content over months and years, just following this simple protocol can really take your SEO to the next level.

Start of the month: 1 hour

So, all right, let’s say we’re at the start of our month. We have our hour. I want you to do one of two things, and this is going to be based on if you’re technical SEO, meaning if your website is using WordPress and it’s pretty much nicely crawlable, maybe you’ve signed up for Google Search Console, you don’t see a lot of errors, there’s not a lot of issues, you haven’t created a bunch of technical data on your website in the past, great, fine, then you’re going to be focused on keywords and content. A keyword to content map, which is something we’ve discussed here on Whiteboard Friday — I’d urge you to check that video out if you haven’t yet — but I’m going to make an MVP version, a very, very small version that can help a little bit.

Keyword → content map MVP

Create a spreadsheet with valuable keywords…

That spreadsheet, I just want a spreadsheet with a few things in it, three things really. The most valuable keywords, so just the most valuable keywords that you know you’re targeting or that you care about right now for your business. You think that people are searching for these keywords. Maybe you’ve done a little bit of keyword research. It could be for free, through Google’s AdWords tool, or you could pay for something like Keyword Explorer for Moz, but, really, just 50 to 100 keywords in there.

…current rank and SERP features…

I want the current rank and whatever SERP features appear. You could even trim this down to just your current ranking and the top search SERP feature, so if it has a featured snippet, or if it has videos, or if it shows maps or news, whatever that is, tweets.

…and the URL targeting it (or a note to create content).

Then I want the URL that’s targeting it. Or if you have no URL targeting it yet, you haven’t yet created a piece of content that targets this keyword, put a little, “Okay, that’s a ‘needs to be created.’ I need this before I can start targeting this keyword and trying to rank for it.”

You’re going to update this weekly. You can do that totally manually. Fifty keywords, you can look them up in an hour. You can check the rankings. You can see where you’re going. That’s fine. It’s a little bit of a pain in the butt, but it can totally be done. Or you could use a tool, Moz Pro, Ahrefs, SEMRush, Searchmetrics. There are all sorts of tools out there that’ll track rankings and show you which features appear and whether your URLs are in there or not.

Okay, this is our keyword to content map. If you have that hour, but you know you have technical issues on the site, I’m going to urge you, before you focus on keywords and content, to make sure your technical SEO, your crawl is set. That means, step one, just a basic, simple crawl analysis. So for free, you can use Google Search Console. It will show you, most of the time with relative accuracy, big important errors like 404s and 500s and things that Google thought we’re duplicate content and that kind of stuff.

If you want to pay, you can get a little bit more advanced features and some better filters and sorting and more frequency and those kinds of things. Moz Pro is fine for that. Screaming Frog is good, OnPage.org. All of these are popular in the SEO field.

Crawl/technical SEO review

Step two, you don’t need to worry about every single crawl issue. I just want you to worry about the most severe, most important ones with your one hour. Those are things like 404s and 500s, which can really cause a lot of problems, duplicate content, where you potentially need to use a rel=canonical or a 301 redirect, broken links, where you just go in and fix the broken link to something that’s not broken, missing or bad titles, title elements that are particularly long or include misspellings or that just don’t exist, bad, very bad to have a page on the web with no title, and thin content or no crawlable content. Those are really the worst of the bunch. There’s a number more that you could take care of. But if you only have that limited time, take care of this. If you’ve already done this, then we can move on here.

Every time you publish a piece of content: 3 minutes

Finally, last thing, but not the least, every time you publish a piece of content, I’m going to ask for just three minutes of your time, and that is going to be around this minimum viable pre-publish checklist.

The minimum viable pre-publish checklist

So does the content have a keyword target? Yes, no, maybe? If it doesn’t, you’re going to need to go and refer over to your keyword content list and make sure that it does. So if you’re publishing something, I’m assuming you’re not publishing a tremendous amount of content, but a little bit. Make sure everyone has a keyword target. Make sure, if you can, that it’s targeting two to three additional keywords, related keywords. So let’s say I’m going after something like Faberge eggs. I probably also want to target Carl Faberge, or I want to target Faberge eggs museums, or I want to target Faberge eggs replicas, so these other terms and phrases that people are likely searching for that could have the same or similar keyword intent, that could live on the same page, that kind of thing.

Is that keyword in the title, the main one you’re targeting? Do you have a compelling meta description? Is your content doing a good job of truly answering the searchers’ queries? So if they’ve searched for this thing, are you serving up the content they need?

Then, have you used related topics? You can get those from places like the MozBar or MarketMuse or SEO Zone or Moz Pro. Related topics are essentially the words and phrases that you should also be using in addition to your keyword to indicate to the search engines, “Hey, this is really about this topic.” We’ve seen some nice bumps from that.

You’re doing this every time you publish content. It only takes three minutes.

Start of the week: 10 minutes

And the last thing, at the start of the week, I’m also asking you for these 10 minutes to do one or two actions. I just want you to plan one or two actions at the start of the week to bump your SEO. It could include some publication stuff. But let’s assume you’re just doing these three minutes every time you do that.

Take a few actions to boost your SEO

Link outreach and targeting keywords with content

At the start of the week, the last thing you’re doing is just choosing one of these, maybe two. I don’t need more. I want you to do something like link outreach. Reach out to a couple of high-potential targets. Maybe you use like a LinkedIn or SecTool to figure out people who are linking to two of your competitors. Or reach out to partners, to friends, do some content contributions, just a little thing to get one or two links. Or maybe create some content that’s targeting a missed keyword. When you do that, of course, you go through your pre-publish checklist.

Upgrade ranking content

Maybe you are upgrading some content that’s already ranking, like number 5 through 20. That’s where there’s a lot of opportunity for a high-value keyword to get bumped up. You could just do little things, like make sure that it’s serving all of these items, try and get it a featured snippet, identify content that might be old, that needs a refresh, that’s not serving the searcher intent as well because the information in there is old.

Contribute off-site content

Or you could try contributing some offsite content. That could be to places like YouTube, maybe you’ve seen videos show up for something, guest posts, a forum where you contribute, answers some questions on Quora, contribute something to LinkedIn or Medium, just something to get your brand, your content, and hopefully a link out there to a different audience than what’s already coming to your site.

You do these things, right, you start the month with an hour. Every time you publish content, you put in 3 minutes, and at the start of the week, you put in 10 minutes to do a couple pieces of planning, this will take you a long way. Look, SEO professionals are going to do a lot more than this, for sure. But this can be a great start, a great way to get that SEO kicked off, to have a minimum viable SEO plan.

I look forward to your thoughts. And we’ll see you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Take care.

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​Feast Your Eyes on the MozCon 2017 Initial Agenda

Posted by ronell-smith

According to our calculations, MozCon 2017 is a mere 158,000 minutes away. (But who’s counting, right?) As you might have guessed, we’re quite excited about our latest event, in large part because we have some new tricks up our sleeves. (More on that at a later date. We promise.)

Aside from a few tweaks here and there, though, the next MozCon won’t be much different from those in years past.

That is, it’ll be unique and awesome in equal amounts.

MozCon 2017: July 17–19 in Seattle

You can still expect world-class speakers sharing original information in a one-of-a-kind, charged atmosphere. Plus great food, plenty of snacks, and conversations that’ll have your mind humming for days.

And for you last-minuters who haven’t grabbed your ticket yet, now’s the time to… um… grab that ticket you’ll be crying over if you wait too long:

Grab your tickets now

We’ve kept you waiting long enough, so take a look at some of what’s in store for you at MozCon 2017.

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Emcee

Last year, we tried a format that included three emcees — Rob Ousbey, Zeph Snapp, and Ronell Smith.
The test was a success, with each doing an amazing job.

However, this year we’re returning to a single-emcee format, with Ronell Smith, a Moz Associate, taking the reins.

Ronell Smith
Strategist at RS Consulting
@ronellsmith

Ronell Smith is a content nerd who loves nothing more than seeing brands help themselves by recognizing content as more than mere words on a page.

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The MozCon 2017 Agenda (Sneak Peek Edition)

With more than three months to go until the event, many of the details are still being finalized. Therefore, you should see this agenda as an appetizer for, say, a five-course meal. There’s plenty more where this came from.

For example, several speaking spots are yet to be finalized, and we’ve yet to send out the call for community speakers.

We’ll share those details in later posts.

However, we’d like to showcase our awesome lineup of speakers, many of whom will be familiar to you for the great work they do and share with the Moz community.

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TBD
Dawn Anderson
Move It Marketing/Manchester Metropolitan University

Dawn Anderson is an International and Technical SEO Consultant, Director of Move It Marketing, and a lecturer at Manchester Metropolitan University.

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Up and to the Right: Growing Traffic, Conversions, & Revenue
Matthew Barby
HubSpot

So many of the case studies that document how a company has grown from 0 to X forget to mention that solutions that they found are applicable to their specific scenario and won’t work for everyone. This falls into the dangerous category of bad advice for generic problems. Instead of building up a list of other companies’ tactics, marketers need to understand how to diagnose and solve problems across their entire funnel. Illustrated with real-world examples, I’ll be talking you through the process that I take to come up with ideas that none of my competitors are thinking of.

Matt, who heads up user acquisition at HubSpot, is an award-winning blogger, startup advisor, and a lecturer.

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Reverse-Engineering Google’s Research Into What People Want
Rob Bucci
STAT Search Analytics

The SERP is the front-end to Google’s multi-billion dollar consumer research machine. They know what searchers want. In this data-heavy talk, Rob will teach you how to uncover what Google already knows about what searchers are looking for. Using this knowledge, you can deliver the right content to the right searchers at the right time, every time.

Rob loves the challenge of staying ahead of the changes Google makes to their SERPs. When not working, you can usually find him hiking up a mountain, falling down a ski slope, or splashing around in the ocean.

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TBD
Stephanie Chang
Etsy

Stephanie currently leads the Global Acquisition & Retention Marketing teams at Etsy. Previously, she was a Senior Consultant at Distilled.

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Inside the Googling Mind: An SEO’s Guide to Winning Clicks, Hearts, & Rankings in the Years Ahead
Rand Fishkin
Founder of Moz, doer of SEO, feminist.

Searcher behavior, intent, and satisfaction are on the verge of overtaking classic SEO inputs (keywords, links, on-page, etc). In this presentation, Rand will examine the shift that behavioral signals have caused, and list the step-by-step process to build a strategy that can thrive long-term in Google’s new reality.

Rand Fishkin is the founder and former CEO of Moz, co-author of a pair of books on SEO, and co-founder of Inbound.org. Rand’s an un-save-able addict of all things content, search, and social on the web.

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Data-Driven Design
Oli Gardner
Unbounce

Data-Driven Design (3D) is an actionable, evidence-based framework for creating websites & landing pages that will increase your leads, sales, and customers. In this session you’ll learn how to use the latest industry conversion data to inform copywriting and design decisions that impact conversions. Additionally, I’ll share a new methodology for prioritizing your marketing optimization that will show you which pages are awesome (leave them alone), which pages aren’t (massive ROI potential here), and help you develop a common language that your teams of marketers, designers, and copywriters can use to work better together to collectively increase your conversion rates.

Unbounce co-founder Oli Gardner is on a mission to rid the world of marketing mediocrity by using data-informed copywriting, design, interaction, and psychology to create a more delightful experience for marketers and customers alike

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The Tie That Binds: Why Email is Key to Maximizing Marketing ROI
Justine Jordan
Litmus

If nailing the “omnichannel” experience (whatever that means!) is key to getting more traffic and converting more leads, what happens if we have our channel priorities out of order? Justine will show you how email — far from being an old-school afterthought — is core to hitting marketing goals, building lifetime value, and making customers happy.

Justine is obsessed with helping marketers create, test, and send better email. Named 2015 Email Marketer Thought Leader of the Year, she is strangely passionate about email marketing, hates being called a spammer, and still gets nervous when pressing send.

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The Truth About Mobile-First Indexing
Cindy Krum
CEO and Founder at MobileMoxie, LLC

Mobile-first design has been a best practice for a while, and Google is finally about to support it with mobile-first indexing. But mobile-first design and mobile-first indexing are not the same thing. Mobile-first indexing is about cross-device accessibility of information, to help integrate digital assistants and web-enabled devices that don’t even have browsers, to achieve Google’s larger goals. Learn how mobile-first indexing will give digital marketers their first real swing at influencing Google’s new AI (Artificial Intelligence) landscape! Marketers who embrace an accurate understanding of mobile-first indexing could see a huge first-mover advantage, similar to the early days of the web, and we all need to be prepared.

Cindy Krum, the CEO and Founder of MobileMoxie, LLC, is the author of Mobile Marketing: Finding Your Customers No Matter Where They Are. She brings fresh and creative ideas to her clients, and regularly speaks at US and international digital marketing events.

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TBD
Joanna Lord
ClassPass

Joanna Lord is the CMO of ClassPass, the world’s leading fitness membership. Prior to that she was VP of Marketing at Porch and CMO of BigDoor. She is a global keynote and digital evangelist. Joanna is a recognized thought leader in digital marketing and a startup mentor.

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TBD
Ian Lurie
Portent, Inc.

Ian Lurie is founder, CEO, and nerdiest marketing nerd at Portent, a digital marketing agency he started in the Cretaceous era, aka 1995. Ian’s meandering career includes marketing copywriting, expert dungeon master, bike messenger-ing, and office temp worker.

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Facing the Future: 5 Simple Tactics for 5 Scary Changes
Dr. Pete Meyers
Moz

We’ve seen big changes to SEO recently, from an explosion in SERP features to RankBrain to voice search. These fundamental changes to organic search marketing can be daunting, and it’s hard to know where to get started. Dr. Pete will walk you through five big changes and five tactics for coping with those changes today.

Dr. Peter J. Meyers (aka “Dr. Pete”) is Marketing Scientist for Seattle-based Moz, where he works with the marketing and data science teams on product research and data-driven content.

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TBD
Britney Muller
Moz

Britney is a MN native who moved to Colorado to fulfill a dream of being a snowboard bum! After 50+ days on the mountain her first season, she got stir-crazy and taught herself how to program, then found her way into SEO while writing for a local realtor.

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How to Get Big Links
Lisa Myers
Verve Search

Everyone wants links and coverage from sites such as New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the BBC, but very few achieve it. This is how we cracked it. Over and over.

Lisa is the founder and CEO of award-winning SEO agency Verve Search and founder of Womeninsearch.net. Feminist, mother of two, and modern-day shield maiden.

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How to Be a Happy Marketer: Survive the Content Crisis and Drive Results by Mastering Your Customer’s Transformational Journey
Tara-Nicholle Nelson
Transformational Consumer Insights

Branded content is way up, but customer engagement with that content is plummeting. This whole scene makes it hard to get up in the morning, as a marketer. But there’s a new path beyond the epidemic of disengagement and, at the end of it, your brand and your content become regular stops along your customer’s everyday journey.

Tara-Nicholle Nelson is the CEO of Transformational Consumer Insights, the former VP of Marketing for MyFitnessPal, and author of the Transformational Consumer.

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Thinking Smaller: Optimizing for the New Wave of Social Video Platforms
Phil Nottingham
Wistia

SnapChat, Facebook, Twitter, Instragram, Periscope… the list goes on. All social networks are now video platforms, but it’s hard to know where to invest. In this session, Phil will be giving you all the tips and tricks for what to make, how to get your content in front of the right audiences, and how get the most value from the investment you’re making in social video.

Phil Nottingham is a strategist who believes in the power of creative video content to improve the way companies speak to their customers, and regularly speaks around the world about video strategy, SEO, and technical marketing.

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Powerful Brands Have Communities
Tara Reed
Apps Without Code

You are laser focused on user growth. Meanwhile, you’re neglecting a gold mine of existing customers who desperately want to be part of your brand’s community. Tara Reed shares how to use communities, gamification, and membership content to grow your revenue.

Tara Reed is a tech entrepreneur & marketer. After running marketing initiatives at Google, Foursquare, & Microsoft, Tara branched out to launch her own apps & startups. Today, Tara helps businesses implement cutting-edge marketing into their businesses.

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I’d Rather Be Thanked Than Ranked
Wil Reynolds
Seer Interactive

Ego and assumptions led me to chose the wrong keywords for my own site — yeah, me, Wil Reynolds, Mr. RCS. How did I spend three years optimizing my site and building links to finally crack the top three for six critical keywords, only to find out that I wasted all that time? However, in spite of targeting the wrong words, Seer grew the business. In this presentation, I’ll show you the mistakes I made and share with you to approaches that can help you to build content that gets you thanked.

A former teacher with a knack for advising, he’s been helping Fortune 500 companies develop SEO strategies since 1999. Today, Seer is home to over 100 employees across Philadelphia and San Diego.

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Marketing in a Conversational World: How to Get Discovered, Delight Your Customers, and Earn the Conversion
Purna Virji
Microsoft

Capturing and keeping attention is one of the hardest parts of our job today. Fact: It’s just going to get harder with the advent of new technology and conversational interfaces. In the brave new world we’re stepping into, the key questions are: How do we get discovered? How can we delight our audiences? And how can we grow revenue for our clients? Come to this session to learn how to make your marketing and advertising efforts something people are going to want to consume.

Named by PPC Hero as the #1 most influential PPC expert in the world, Purna specializes in SEM, SEO, and future search trends. She is a popular global keynote speaker and columnist, an avid traveler, aspiring top chef, and amateur knitter.

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Stay tuned

Again, consider this morsel of information as simply the first of many courses to follow. In upcoming posts we’ll share details regarding after-hours activities, including MozCrawl.

Don’t forget your tickets!

Also, you didn’t hear this from us, but there may even be a few exciting, totally new changes for 2017. Mum’s the word.

We’ll be back soon.

Tell us — who are you most excited to see and hear speak this year?

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