Elizabeth Marsten will be speaking on the “Beyond Thunderdome-When you run out of PPC fuel” panel at SearchFest 2014 which will take place on February 28th, 2014 in Portland, Oregon. For more information and to purchase tickets, please click here.

1) Please give us your background and tell us what you do for a living.
I am a VP of Search Marketing at Portent, Inc. in Seattle, WA. I got started in PPC back in 2006 and was certain it was called “pay per clip” marketing at first. After I figured out what it really was, I worked on Portent’s PPC client list, smashing through negative ROI and building campaigns of all shapes and sizes. I was promoted to a Guru, then Manager of the department and eventually Director of Search, where I was dabbling in SEO, social, content and links. Now as a VP, I oversee the PPC department directly and I work with Directors of SEO and Social to round out Portent’s search division. I also work on continuing education in search for the entire company, speak about PPC at conferences all over the USA and write about PPC. A lot.

2) For the client that wants more paid search volume beyond AdWords & AdCenter, what might you recommend?
Social PPC. It’s the Next Big Thing. The platforms will rival AdWords & Bing Ads in terms of volume, but their success is and should be measured differently than that of pure search engine ads. That means it’s less “valuable” in a last click attribution world- but we should really be moving on past that anyway. Check out the social platform that best suits your products/services from Facebook and Twitter to LinkedIn or Reddit. There are tons of options out there.

3) What is Search Retargeting and why should I care about it?
Search Retargeting refers to the ability of an advertiser to “remarket” to someone that has visited their site before and performed another search on Google.com that may or may not be directly related to the advertiser’s site. For example, comparison shoppers tend to visit multiple sites comparing prices over time. Being able to show an ad to that searcher in the SERP itself when they are searching/viewing competitor search results is a pretty powerful reminder to them.

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