Susan Delz will be speaking at the “UX and Audience” session at SearchFest 2013 which will be taking place on February 22, 2013 at the Governor Hotel in Portland, Oregon. For more information or to purchase tickets, please click the following link.

1) Please give us your background and let us know what you do for a living.

I work with companies to help them develop measurable, high-ROI online marketing programs. The most rewarding part of my what I do is partnering with my customers to concept a conversion optimization program with them from end-to-end. Hearing their business success stories, and their personal success stories makes, me proud of what I do because I know they’re business changing results. I’m blessed to work with an incredible team at ion, and have equally as incredible clients.

2) Can you give me several characteristics that well-converting landing pages possess?

There really isn’t a one-size fits all approach for high-converting landing pages. What works for some, might not work for others and conversely. If you have a culture of experimentation and testing, then you’ll likely have a high-converting landing page program. There are some best practices that should be followed, like ensuring your pages are message matched and that the creative or brand is cohesive from the click source. If you want more than what I can cover in a mini-interview, you can get 50 landing pages best practices here. Or come to my session. : )

Landing Pages Best Practices

3) At what point should a business consider a third party solution for landing page creation / testing?

If you aren’t using a third party solution to grow or increase the sophistication of your landing page program, then it’s probably time to start considering one. Users are smart and they have expectations. They want to be served experiences that are relevant to them by their geo-graphic location. They want you to remember them when they are a return visitor. They want to be served pages that are specific to the device they are using. And so much more. A few years ago, using a 3rd party solution might not have been a necessity. Today, creating a landing page optimization program that is flexible and agile, with the sophistication your users expect is near impossible without a dedicated solution.

Aaron Bradley will be speaking at the “Schema, Open Graph, and Semantic Markup” session at SearchFest 2013 which will be taking place on February 22, 2013 at the Governor Hotel in Portland, Oregon. For more information or to purchase tickets, please click the following link.

1) Please give us your background and let us know what you do for a living.

Academically, I have a BA in English literature, with a specialization in post-structuralist literary theory. After obtaining that extremely useful (cough) degree, I worked for a decade or so as a technical librarian, then for another decade as a web designer.

(Those three biographical details – that is, sizeable stints working on semiotics, document classification and web development – basically summarizes why I’m now talking to you about search and the semantic web.)

In 2005 I turned my attention to organic search and have never looked back. Since then I’ve worked as an in-house SEO for enterprise online gaming, ecommerce and content sites. As with many SEOs, my areas of interest and responsibility have gradually morphed into other, related realms, with analytics, conversion optimization, email marketing, social media and advertising increasingly occupying my time.

At present, I head up Internet marketing efforts at InfoMine, Inc., which serves the international mining industry (“mining” as in “rocks,” not “data”). Their portfolio includes dedicated information, news and education sites in multiple languages, so the work is varied, interesting and challenging.

While it touches on my professional activities only indirectly, I am also engrossed by the drama of digital disruption in the news and publishing businesses. My interest in Italian cuisine is equally obsessive but less perverse.

2) What would you tell somebody who won’t do structured data because “Google Will Figure It Out”.

Strictly on logical grounds, I find it perplexing that any SEO should take this position. Optimizing for search entails – among other things – making on-page changes directed at improving a site’s visibility in search results. The addition of semantic markup is just another optimization activity.

To use a relevant analogy, Google can “figure out” the subject matter of a page if the page title tag is suboptimal, or even blank. Yet, of course, few search marketers would push back against making changes to a title tag on this account. Structured data is simply another mechanism that an optimization specialist can, and should, use to help sites perform better in search.

Can Google “figure out” information without having it provided specifically in machine-readable format (because, at a fundamental level, semantic markup is about adding a data layer for machine consumption that is separate from the presentation layer provided for humans)? Sure. Kind of. Sort of. Maybe.

But by providing structured data to Google, one decreases the ambiguity that may be present in unstructured data: you’re making Google guess less. Google might figure out that in a recipe the phrase “the whole thing takes about an hour to cook” means “preparation time is equal to one hour” but it might not. Modifying the code to tell Google explicitly that “preparation time is equal to one hour” vastly improves the chances that Google indexes the recipe’s preparation time and assigns the correct value to that time. This, in turn, of course improves the chances the recipe will appear in queries that include or are filtered for preparation time.

“Helping Google figure things out” is particularly important when it comes to named entities: people, places, organizations and the like. If a web document makes a reference to “London” is this London, England or London, Ontario? You can trust Google to “figure it out” or – without being required to change the text – you can eliminate that ambiguity for the search engine, and be confident that the page has a better chance of showing up in relevant “London” queries, without marring results (and your engagement metrics) by turning up in the queries for the other London.

3) How do you see semantic markup evolving in the next 1-2 years?

Strictly on the markup side, I don’t think we’ll see any radical changes to the vocabularies and markup protocols in broad use today.

schema.org will almost certainly be extended further, but I don’t expect any radical changes to that or the Open Graph protocol in the next couple of years (if anything major does happen with schema.org I think it will revolve around better mechanisms to meaningfuly link other vocabularies, rather than big growth in the core vocabulary).

On the syntax side, it will be interesting to see if the balance tilts decisively in favor of RDFa or microdata. RDFa is certainly the more robust markup protocol and clearly better loved by semantic web developers, but less technical webmasters continue to favor microdata (and it is anything but absent in the enterprise). So long as Google continues to promote it, I think we’ll probably see microdata become more ubiquitous.

Depending on the success of the Data Highlighter program for event markup, we might see Google extend the Highlighter to other data types. And it’s possible that Bing might follow suit with a code-free data structuring mechanism of its own. In general, I think the search engines will continue to work on tools and mechanisms that make it easier for website owners to provide structured data information to them.

I’m hopeful we’ll see more – and more useful – semantic markup tools being developed in support of the search engines’ structured data initiatives. Tool development has certainly lagged behind vocabulary and syntax evolution: for example, there’s still no WordPress plugin that allows marketers to markup schema.org types inline.

I think any really big changes that we’ll see in the next one to two years won’t come in the form of changes to semantic markup, but the uses that the search engines make of it.

Expect further enhancements to Google’s Knowledge Graph and Bing’s Snapshots. The most exciting prospect here (of which we’ve already seen some signs) is site-level data starting to inform the Knowledge Graph, and even links being generated from Knowledge Graph results to the sites that contribute to it. That is, Wikipedia and Freebase-derived information may increasingly be augmented with other qualified structured data sources.

And the $64,000 question (give or take a few zeros) still hovering in the air is “whither Facebook?” Graph Search is all fine and well, but at this point its utility still seems limited to the walled garden that is Facebook, and Bing results have been only nominally enhanced in the process. But there’s a veritable gold mine of structured data available via the Graph API if Facebook and its partners can figure out how to profitably leverage it.

Jeff Preston will be speaking at the “Schema, Open Graph, and Semantic Markup” session at SearchFest 2013 which will be taking place on February 22, 2013 at the Governor Hotel in Portland, Oregon. For more information or to purchase tickets, please click the following link.

1) Please give us your background and let us know what you do for a living.
I am the SEO Manager for Disney Interactive Entertainment. We cover most of the entertainment sites for The Walt Disney Company, including Disney Channel and Disney Studios.

2) What is Facebook Open Graph and why should we care?
Open Graph allows you to manage how your webpages look when shared in Facebook. It is also used by other social media platforms, including Twitter and Google Plus. The launch of Graph Search suggests tagging your content in Facebook friendly way will become even more important.

3) In 2013, how well can one correlate proper semantic structuring with increases in web traffic?
It depends. A couple of things we have seen.

If your site has recipes, products, and/or reviews, you can see an improved click through rate with rich snippets in the SERPs.

The pages that have proper semantic structure also seem to show up for the correct query. We used to see Flash games show up in Video results. Once we marked those pages up with the correct Schema.org markup, the SERPs suddenly looked a lot better.

Marshall Simmonds will be speaking at the “SEO Bootcamp” session at SearchFest 2013 which will be taking place on February 22, 2013 at the Governor Hotel in Portland, Oregon. For more information or to purchase tickets, please click the following link.

1) Please give us your background and let us know what you do for a living.

I’m the Founder and CEO of Define Media Group, specializing in enterprise search marketing and strategic audience development. I’ve been involved in search since 1997, was the Chief Search Strategist for About.com from 1999-2011 of which the last five were spent quarterbacking all search strategy initiatives for the New York Times Company portfolio. Define Media Group started in 2005 and officially broke off from the NYTCo in January of 2011. Define works with many of the most influential brands and networks in the world.

2) How does somebody learn SEO in 2013?

Read, execute, learn.

There are exceptional sources of information covering these topics too (and as always some not so good) to learn intro and advanced techniques. For example, intro info from SEOMoz.org is some of the best out there but as best practice strategies evolve, fracture, and re-focus, seeking out specialists in the industry is critical for advanced learning and industry networking. AJ Kohn’s site http://blindfiveyearold.com/ is an incredible repository for all things G+/Authorship/SEO related. If your travels take you to the land of Structured Data, Aaron Bradley and http://www.seoskeptic.com/ is the best in the space. John Doherty is really becoming a great technical SEO and Phil Nottingham is the person to follow for video SEO, Annie Cushing for data analysis and all things Excel. If mobile strategy is important, Cindy Krum at http://www.mobilemoxie.com/ is a must-read. I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention our blog at Define’s site that focuses on our extensive expertise with big data and enterprise SEO. The point is no one site can address every need, agenda or strategy so seek out the vertical experts.

3) People say that SEO has evolved from more of a technical pursuit to a marketing pursuit. What’s your opinion about this?

All SEO roads lead through tech and metrics, so it has been, so it shall be. You need a change site wide? You have to navigate the technical landscape which entails understanding how a particular team manages and prioritizes their roadmap. Once changes are implemented it has to be quantified and that means data analysis through metrics. However marketing, learning how to reach, engage and retain a particular audience, is obviously very important and no way inferior to technical pursuits. I see these all as equally important pieces of the greater SEO and Audience Development pie and more an exercise in campaign management, risk assessment and resource allocation.

Mel Carson will be speaking at the “Digital Evangelism Inside & Out” session at SearchFest 2013 which will be taking place on February 22, 2013 at the Governor Hotel in Portland, Oregon. For more information or to purchase tickets, please click the following link.

1) Please give us your background and let us know what you do for a living.
I’ve spent last 12 years connecting consumers and businesses through search engine marketing, digital advertising and social media. During 7 of those years I travelled the world as Microsoft’s Digital Marketing Evangelist talking about the industry, dissecting the issues and providing a platform for thought leaders to discuss trends and offer their advice on what’s coming next. I left Microsoft in 2012 to start Delightful Communications, a social media integration, digital PR and personal branding consultancy based in Seattle. I love doing digital for a living.

2) How did you evangelize AdCenter to the hordes of people who saw AdWords as the only valid PPC platform?
Back in 2006 when adCenter (now Bing Ads) launched, Microsoft had a tiny market share, but many in the industry relished a new player who would try and push the envelope and provide some kind of complimentary platform. We started with a blog on Windows Live Spaces (remember that?!) and a forum, and made it our mission to “help advertisers help themselves”. Customer service, engagement and timely responses were hugely important to that mission. We really saw the opportunity to differentiate through really listening to customers and building trust. I then got invited to speak at more conferences and worked on building my personal brand on MelCarson.com. Customers and potential customers valued having a “face” they could identify with and approach instead of just a logo. It was a long few years of chipping away before Bing caught up and the Yahoo! Search Alliance was struck, but the rest, as they say, is history.

3) How is social media a platform for brand evangelism?
Social media provides a mechanism for both a one-to-one and one-to-many dialogue. My mantra has always been to make helpful and relevant content and messaging discoverable and sharable through digital means. Don’t make the mistake of setting up your channels, crossing your fingers and hoping for it all to go viral. Integrating your social channels into your other marketing channels will help amplify the essence behind your products and services beyond others who don’t, simply because you’re giving them a chance to be found more easily and shared for longer. Social media is a fantastic tool for building relationships with potential brand advocates and ambassadors. With the right chemistry, these advocates can help you propel your brand into the consciousness of customers and potential customers you’d never even thought of.

BTW, for those who don’t know…Mel was the dashing young gentleman in this Joe Cocker video:

Mike Ramsey will be speaking at the “What Drives Local Rankings” session at SearchFest 2013 which will be taking place on February 22, 2013 at the Governor Hotel in Portland, Oregon. For more information or to purchase tickets, please click the following link.

1) Please give us your background and let us know what you do for a living.

I come from the small town of Burley, Idaho. We have a Walmart, a McDonalds and a lot of struggling small businesses in my market. I own the local weekly newspaper and also Nifty Marketing, which is a local search marketing company. Due to being raised and living in Burley, I have always had a love of local businesses. That is how and why I got deep into local search. I love watching small and big companies learn how to reach a tight geographic area. I think the reason why is because there is rarely short cuts, or the ability to churn and burn with your customers. You just have to be the best at what you do, fill a need, and give back to the local community. That is why I live in the world of local search.

2) Do the quality of local reviews affect the search rankings, or is it just the quantity of them?

Quantity has definitely seems to trump Quality up til now. But things are changing. If you search within Google+ local for a business you are given 4 options for ranking results

From Top Reviewers, People Like You, Just For You, Your Circles

So what does this mean for local search? Quality, location, review history, and circles could at some point be used in the main serps as a factor. These are arleady being used in Google+ so as more and more integration takes place, I have the feeling that we will see a major shift from getting lots of reviews, to get the right type of reviews from the right people. After all, that is the way the world works and google’s goal is to replicate the real world. Businesses can fake quantity but they will never be able to fake quality. It’s an outcome of good service and outreach.

3) How do you think Facebook’s new Search Initiative will affect local business marketing?

There was a great post on LocalU that myself and other members of the faculty put together on our thought on Facebook’s Graph Search. Overall I think the idea that they have is excellent. Being able to see meaningful and sufficient recommendations based on my group of friends and acquaintances is definitely the next stage in local search, the question is not if that will happen on a scalable basis but who will have the market. Google or Facebook? Right now facebook is behind, Google+ is rapidly growing and is already the default search engine, They have the business data and reviews from their own system and the purchase of Zagat. If Facebook is serious about catching up they will have to make a move for a major partnership or purchase of Yelp, or a similar directory to have review relevance in the local space. Overall, the game is changing, social search makes sense for local businesses and people need to recognize this and watch the Google+ Facebook battle very closely.

Duane Forrester will be giving the afternoon keynote at SearchFest 2013 which will be taking place on February 22, 2013 at the Governor Hotel in Portland, Oregon. For more information or to purchase tickets, please click the following link.

1) Please give us your background and let us know what you do for a living.

I am Duane Forrester, and I help run Bing Webmaster Tools. Prior
to this I ran SEO for MSN. Before that I worked for a startup in
Canada in the sports and betting world and even farther back, I worked
for casino run by Caesar’s Palace. Along the way I wrote How To Make
Money With Your Blog and Turn Clicks Into Customers. Most of my time
these days is involved with evangelism within the webmaster community
and helping businesses be more successful online.

2) What is a “quality website” in the eyes of Bing?

At its core, it’s a site that helps a visitor accomplish their task
as efficiently as possible. Could be something simple like telling
them what the weather is, or as complex as helping them understand
what issues they face if traveling between African countries on
motorcycle. The focus for the site should always, obviously, be on
the user’s experience. Start to focus too much on SEO, or embedding
ads, or using third party content to cut down on the need to invest
time in your own content, and quality suffers.

3) I certainly perceive you as a very accessible guy for the position
you hold. What is your philosophy behind “webmaster outreach”?

Everyone started in this industry knowing exactly squat about SEO.
None of us learned SEO and online marketing in school…LOL I spent a
decade learning what mattered. As my career grew, I found myself fin
a unique position to help others from within one of the largest engines online.
Luckily for me, Microsoft has a long history of partnering with other
businesses, so the idea of my role was an obvious fit with Bing. It
sounds old fashioned, but if we can help sites improve, our results
improve, so we approach improvement through our own work & investment,
and via open partnerships.

4) Bing isn’t nearly as secretive about ranking factors as Google. Why is that?

Why be secret? Obviously we can’t share the proprietary stuff, but
for the most part, the industry is on the right track. Big picture,
it makes sense to acknowledge what we can so businesses can get work
done – and done right – rather than wasting time guessing and making
mistakes. This is a bit self-serving though, because if ever saw the
sheer volume of simple mistakes websites make, it’s a bit stunning.
Sharing the constructs of the basic do’s and don’ts just makes sense for both sides of the equation.

5) Can you talk more about the Bing social search integration and where it’s heading?

Bing believes in openly partnering with class-leading sites in ways
that improve the search experience. Our ability to access and
showcase data relevant to a query means searchers find what they need,
faster. Instead of juts searching through a stack of results, we feel
that incorporating relevant signposts from friends and connections can
help you reach your goal more directly. Social has the ability to
capture snippets of information from your trusted sources. Our goal
is to bring forward those relevant snippets at the right time, to help
you in your search. While some people still like to say that social
is a fad, we know it’s here to stay. It’s value to individual has
been proven as a way to find news, stay in touch with family and friends and nurture new relationships.

6) Can I get your opinion on the new Yahoo program that brings the paid
lead gen form right into the organic SERP
(http://searchengineland.com/yahoo-intros-cost-per-lead-ad-unit-within-organic-search-results-column-142506)?
Do you see this as “crossing the line” that traditionally divides
organic listings and paid advertising?

Bing doesn’t comment on products, features or services run by other
companies. While we maintain a great partnership with Yahoo, it’s not
our place to comment on their products.

Jon Henshaw will be speaking at the “SEO Tools Shoutout” session at SearchFest 2013 which will be taking place on February 22, 2013 at the Governor Hotel in Portland, Oregon. For more information or to purchase tickets, please click the following link.

1) Please give us your background and let us know what you do for a living.

I’m the Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer of Raven Internet Marketing Tools, a web-based application for managing SEO, Social and PPC online marketing campaigns. Basically, I get to make awesome tools for a living that I actually want to use.

While I’ve been involved in website development and Internet strategy since 1995, my education would tell you otherwise. I have a bachelor’s degree in Human Development and Family Studies and a master’s degree in Counseling Psychology. Several years ago I had a part-time private practice. I pulled it off by doing my normal day job and then doing counseling in the evenings. I distinctively remember not getting much sleep!

Ultimately though, I found that I enjoyed being a geek, doing SEO and creating tools for the Internet the most, and I haven’t looked back since.

2) What is the future of “Rank Checking” in SEO Toolsets?

The question to ask before that is, “What is the future of ranking results?” For me the answer is easy. They will become increasingly disparate as search engines (Google in particular) continue to diversify and redefine how search results are returned. I think the most accurate, useful and reliable ranking result is going to end up being average position, especially if the search engine provides that data.

As for the future:

I think that Google probably has had enough of their networks being scraped. I think they’ll step up their efforts to block scrapers, something they’ve always done to some degree.

I have no idea if Google will decide to take legal action this year (or ever), but I do believe that they’ll start to use API access to their other data sources, such as Google Analytics, as leverage for compliance from toolmakers.

I don’t think it will be the scraping of Google SERPs that ultimately gets them in a fighting mood, it will be the scraping of Google AdWords data. That’s data that Google sells. When AdWords data is scraped and resold, Google loses money. What company likes data they make money on to be scraped and resold—especially as legitimate data? It would fire me up, that’s for sure. That’s why I believe any tool provider selling scraped Google AdWords data is on risky ground.

Raven stopped using any scraped Google data on Jan. 2, 2013—a purposeful step off that risky ground for our company and our customers.

3) How can a Search Marketing Toolset differentiate themselves in a very dynamic marketplace?

When you say dynamic I assume you really mean crowded.

A toolset can differentiate itself with competitive pricing, a better user experience, unique tools and diversified offerings. It can also act quickly to adjust to new market demands and then be first to market with tools that address those changes.

Jonathon Colman will be speaking at the “UX and Audience” session at SearchFest 2013 which will be taking place on February 22, 2013 at the Governor Hotel in Portland, Oregon. For more information or to purchase tickets, please click the following link.

1. Please give us your background and let us know what you do for a living.

Yowza! I’m Jonathon Colman (@jcolman) and I’m the Principal Experience Architect with REI. I focus on information architecture and content strategy, which means that I play a role in structuring data and content to create rich experiences that help our customers achieve their goals while also supporting the needs of our business.

But don’t go thinking that I’m some pointy-headed, bespectacled taxonomy nerd — even though I am! — because I’ve also been a practicing in-house SEO and Internet marketer for big organizations like REI and The Nature Conservancy for nearly a decade. I helped lead the Conservancy win two Webby Awards in 2009 for Best Charitable Organization/Nonprofit Web Site, including a People’s Choice award.

But as a graduate student at the University of Washington, I’m learning how to bridge the gaps that often occur between people, information, and technology at organizations. This made me want to explore other ways of learning from our users and find out how I can serve them better with information products and services. That’s why I recently left SEO to pursue information architecture and content strategy.

In other news, I drink a lot of coffee.

2. What is content strategy and why does it matter for marketers?

A lot of folks conflate content marketing with content strategy. But that’s unwise because there’s so much more to content strategy than just marketing. And that’s a good thing, because when content strategy goes wrong, you’ll find that your brand takes a hit, but that the solution almost always lies outside of your marketing team. Content strategy works best when everyone has a stake in making things work better for your users and customers.

Kristina Halvorson defined content strategy as planning for “the creation, publication, and governance of useful, usable content.” Now your mileage may vary, but to me it sounds like that’s a lot more than just running a blog or promoting an infographic. I think that content strategy is a requisite component of building a durable brand, a connected audience, and a healthy community that lasts for the next hundred years.

The core components of content strategy are:
Editorial strategy
Web writing
Metadata strategy
SEO
Content management strategy
Content channel distribution strategy

As marketers, we’re often accountable for some of these categories of work, but for the others, we’re mostly just dabblers or perhaps wholly unaware of their importance for (and impact on) the customer experience. How many of us can actually speak to metadata design, architecture, and management outside of elements in HTML and Schema.org? Likewise, how many are experts in content management systems? Likely, we’re just business users and stakeholders.

And that’s OK! You don’t need to be an expert in everything under the sun. Content strategy is the discipline that brings together all those stakeholders and individual domain experts in order to achieve a Greater Good: helping your customers meet their goals by planning for and providing a great experience.

3. How can content strategy impact SEO strategy?

I’ve talked in the past about how SEOs can approach content strategy in their work as well as how (and why) content strategists should build SEO into their discipline.

There are so many clear benefits to those savvy businesses who invest sustainably in both disciplines and then empower their teams to work together. Among them: more efficient workflows for content creation, production, and broadcasting/sharing; the ability to truly create content just once and publish it everywhere (a.k.a. “COPE“); greater connection to (and understanding of) your customers; an increased ability to test content effectively with actionable outcomes; and many, many more.

Likewise, the benefits to SEO are amazing: improved brand visibility, awareness, and search rank; increased conversion for core user tasks; reduced duplicate and near-duplicate content; more attention for your data-driven strategy; greater ease of delivering content across all of your brand presences, including social media venues; and more willingness from your customers to engage with you everywhere.

If you want your content to work harder for you, to drive more traffic and sales, to connect in meaningful and valuable ways to your audience, then content strategy should be part of your future.

Dan Sundgren will be speaking at the “Paid Search” session at SearchFest 2013 which will be taking place on February 22, 2013 at the Governor Hotel in Portland, Oregon. For more information or to purchase tickets, please click the following link.

1) Please give us your background and let us know what you do for a living.
I have been in the interactive marketing industry close to 15 years. I have worked at several companies including AOL/Time Warner, Google and Intelius. I had the opportunity to get on the Google bus in 2003 opening up the Seattle office and still look back at that run as one hell of a ride that I would be surprised I will see again. Currently, I am running the marketing in house for Intelius and have built the largest SEM Keyword set ever to my knowledge. I love to geek out in general on the online marketing ecosystem and build kick ass teams that are smarter than me and maybe, just maybe more fun than me.

2) What considerations should an Enterprise-level business take into account when evaluating a bid management platform?
First off, bid algo’s are NOT for every business. I sold Efficient Frontier and am intimately familiar with how they work, pricing and a lot of the smoke and mirrors components to them. My best advice would be to weigh the cost/benefit with a test if you are keen on exploring them, look at the pricing structure you are paying (usually a % of spend) and hammer that against how much REAL incremental lift the algo produces. It’s tricky in many ways because with a true portfolio managed algo approach, it will need your head terms to blend into the overall ROI metrics you establish which is somewhat counter to most in house teams that like to daily monitor Head terms and be nimble. So there is a trust there. One other tough piece is you can end up paying a fairly large % of spend and the accounts will usually reach a happy place and settle, so you are shelling out a lot of money for an algo working in a normalized market. I’ve seen it happen many, many times. Lastly, become an Adwords Editor and Bing Editor freak, they are your best friends and can do a LOT of heavy lifting across your accounts, that’s just blocking and tackling before you even consider a bid mgmt platform.

3) How can an account manager effectively manage a PPC account with tens of millions of keywords in it?
See my last sentence above. =) Google’s API costs can quickly make it a non starter so use those two tools like mad. You can ask Bing for unlimited API access and they are pretty good about that. I have spent the last 4+ years on the advisory boards of Google and Bing helping them improve the tools (and ad platforms for that matter) They are listening and putting a lot of resources into them. Hammer on them, break them, give them feedback and make them your everyday hammer. I prefer to dedicate a wicked fast desktop box with a shit load of RAM and no applications on it except Excel, those two tools and a browser for just this purpose. It also helps to put a picture of a monkey on a keyboard above said box, keeps you in a self deprecating mood when you are pushing around chunks of Keywords throughout the day.