Dan Sundgren will be speaking about “Advanced PPC” at SearchFest 2012, which will be held February 24, 2012 at The Governor Hotel in Portland, Oregon. For more information or to purchase tickets, please click here.
1) Please give us your background and tell us what you do for a living?
I have been an interactive marketer since 1999, my first ad sales job was selling 88×31’s and 468’s to a little shop in Seattle called Avenue A. At that time I co-founded a group called SeattleNetwork which grew pretty damn large and we threw events every month around Seattle for people involved in the online space. Much to the consternation of my PR chair we went out with a bang with a Pink Slip Party/Stock Option Burning Contest at the Showbox. Since then I have had a really fun/wild ride through the ups and downs with companies ranging from the Instantcourier.com, AeA, AOL, Google, Efficient Frontier and now Intelius. The last few years I help out where I can with the NWIAG (which birthed the first SIC just last month) and you wonderful folks down in Portland with the SEMpdx group. I love to speak and suppose I would characterize my insights and thoughts as complete and total no bullshit lightly smoked with some humor and real world takeaways. I read Wired Magazine too, I don’t need some speaker telling me about some shit that’s coming out in 2015.
Today, I run Marketing for one of the leaders in online consumer info-commerce, Intelius. I am really lucky to be a part of such a stellar group of people, we really do work hard and play hard. I try and keep it simple with work, if you wake up thinking about your office and aren’t into it, you shouldn’t be doing it.
2) How do you see +1 impacting the world of Paid Search?
When I was at Google and the book “The Wisdom of Crowds” came out by Surowiecki in 2004 we started using this mindset for it seemed like everything. “Where should we put the new coffee machine?” well, there’s an online voting widget for that for the entire office to voice their opinion. Larry and Sergey even worked feedback from many people into reviews vs. a single manager and we started using the idea for all kinds of company decisions. So, Google knows that the many can and usually are much much better at decision making than one or few. (Steve Jobs might call BS on this not to mention that seemed funny in light of the NASA brain trust Google had and has) And Google+ is another layer of social interaction with the web using some triggers they can measure and if they can scale it, it adds a load of interesting people decisioning to the ALGO. And that would be the SEM and SEO side of course. So yes, I pay close attention to it and it will be interesting to watch what the +1’s are doing to QS and what not. If your site doesn’t have +1 on it top of the fold, geterdone!
3) Please give me 3 important PPC metrics that should be tracked by account managers but frequently aren’t.
VOLUME & ROI-it kills me when people talk about how great their CPA is after losing 40% of your volume, just KILLS me, you have to establish a balance (so that’s 2)
BUDGET-if you have hard metrics and are a true DR operator budgets are for chumps and brands, you shouldn’t have any, it’s an all you can eat SEM world once you get your house in order.
Thanks for the chance to talk shop and I am thrilled to be a part of SearchFest!
Todd Mintz knows PPC…knows Social Media…knows SEO…knows Blogging…knows Domaining…and knows them all real well. He runs growth marketing for )and is also a Director & Founding Member of SEMpdx: Portland, Oregon’s Search Engine Marketing Association, and he can be found here on Twitter and Facebook.
