Grumpy PPC Notes from PPCEE

The PPCEE conference is over and here’re the things i’ll save for myself.

Firstly my best impression was of moderator: Ján Gordulič. Honestly every marketing event should have a standup comedian for the moderator job, Jan made some unbearable moments fun and light, and transformed those into internal jokes.

Regarding the actual material i gotta say after years in online marketing I rarely get brand new information however PPCEE had some nice surprises but mostly in the morning block of presentations. Was it planned like this on purpose? I don’t know.

My personal top

Ondra Slama

Ondra told about a case where he was a consulting strategist for a fund raising project. It was so engagingly presented that by the end i was on the edge of my seat “So did they make it with the 12 mln kc on time?!?! Tell me! i’m too emotionally invested!”

I really liked the no bullshit presentation style where instead of ‘we worked smoothly as a team’ Ondra went through explaining how the actual communication and decision making went.

My key takeaway reminder from Ondra Slama’s presentation was: don’t get stuck in a narrow view of tactics – instead bother to find time to calmly think and strategize. Ironically in a restricted time frame it can deliver better than quicker go-to typical solutions.

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… and also maybe don’t fully trust a ppc specialist who’s over confident to deliver 12 mln result on 30k investment 😂

Regine Hemre

Regine’s presentation was a delight for me. Honestly, thinking of targeting atheists in Norway by creating a custom audience of people liking Rickie Gervais is genius.

Tips from Regine Hemre for this season:

  • Use discovery ads: higher engagement – great for push campaigns. Careful so many of them are gmail ads so don’t get dollars in your eyes like a disney character just yet.
  • Use custom audiences (use at least 15-30 signals and use competitors domain). A great solution where you can’t find and segment people otherwise.
  • High quality source for Similar audiences.
  • Focus on creative and check your ads before the season. Don’t create an ad with too many messages. And don’t do the same Black Friday ad as everybody else.

Tomáš Komárek

I was pleasantly surprised that somebody, in this case Tomáš, doesn’t give up on proper ad testing. For the past two years i’ve been hearing only two approaches to ad testing:

  • ad loooads of ETA and RSA ads and let them fight, the one shown by google the most is the winner
  • use ad variation for traffic split

Tomáš went hardcore into segmenting the shit out of the ads data to the level of absolute top of top, which i can only remember as ‘top of the top of the top..’

Check out this link if you’re into such thing:

Bonus round of useful tips

Alina Tutulan

Great presentation on export campaigns to Romanian market. Working in Notino I knew that Romanian has 2 Black Fridays but now i know why. Takeaway – listen to your local employees and not just blindly copy what works in your headquarters country.

Mojmír Mesároš

  • Create the simplest video, use people who watched 75%+ and recycle.
  • Carefully select the Campaign objective because Facebook will do just that.

Daniel Kafka

Shared advanced tips to steal for microsites and B2B remarketing lists creation:

  • track every element interaction on the page (sliders, options clicking)
  • time on the page integration through Tag Manager
  • and even creating virtual URLs

Róbert Lelkes

I personally also liked a lot the internal dashboard for each client to monitor potential issues.

Andrej Salner

Andrej shared how to think about brand campaigns – when they make sense and not – and how his automated brand campaign saved clients lots of money. Though Andrej couldn’t share with the crowd the actual script it’s good to know about such a solution with technical tips to implement in case of the right client.

Stood out

Gennadiy Vorobyov

Gennadiy shared tips on setting up alerts and dashboards when your ppc team is 50+ people:

  • power BI scripts
  • Google Analytics alerts
  • make people in your team co-owners aka working on %
  • dashboard profitability by team member and use in assigning new clients
  • include hours remaining per client in dashboards
  • analyse proportion of work/slack-off time per employee when s/he complains s/he doesn’t have enough time

Though tips like setting up Google Analytics alerts, dashboards for projects examples were elaborate and inspirational, the only real takeaway from the presentation for me was to never work in Netpeak because I’ll have to track every bathroom break and coffee sip. 😰

I follow Netpeak agency since I became an online marketer and it’s confusing to realise that the amazing client casestudies and 1500+ blog articles are created in a factory like conditions.

Gergő Demjén

Gergő is annoyingly smart. His presentation with in-depth explanation and comparison on attribution models was sometimes hard to follow. And no, I’m not dumb, I know those models, but Gergő is so fast you’ll be wishing he’d have a speed control button like a youtube video.

Be sure to check out PPCEE event for the next year.