More from SMX: Paid Search Roundtable

This session was in a much nicer room than the organic sessions. That was noted many times in the organic side. Danny begged us not to come over here and see the cushiness that the paid side gets. Then justifies it by calling organic the “tough marketers.”

To the session:

Yahoo
Stewart from Yahoo starts out by talking about Panama — blah, blah, we’ve heard about it, we are living it. Move on.

There were some points about Yahoo now revealing invalid clicks (yawn) and domain blocking. But the real news here was the quality based pricing that everyone is now talking about. Apparently advertisers will get discounts for poorer quality clicks. I’d be fascinated to hear what they mean by that. LINK DEAD

More news was about the new API program. There are levels, some more cool stuff … not my thing right now. But you can read more here if need be. Yahoo APIs

MSN
Doug from MSN then started. He focused first on their new guy. The model in all of their new campaigns. He’s supposed to be “marriage material” … “attractive but scrawny” and “not high-matienance.” MSN’s idea here, or that of their marketing team is to get us (webmasters) to propose to them. He is to be the “McDreamy of paid search, just more faithful.”

The most fascinating thing about this section was MSN noted that they need more clicks and quality based ranking. There will be bulk managing, full text search for campaigns (finding things within the platform), campaign import, and favorites.

I’m still waiting for something new …

Google

The part we all wanted to hear, Frederick from Google. I try not to be a psuedo Googler, but they come up with such great things! My favorite is the SMS Notifications he announced. That way if your account is down you know immediately, not just when you next check your work email. Wait, that can have some drawbacks too. I can see it now … “hold on guys, I have to go fix my campaigns” … (leaving a theatre).

And a new one on me. AdWords Editor! You can use this tool to find duplicates, identify poor performing campaigns, and export all the new data into spreadsheets. Loving it! There are also searches now for negative keywords and negative exact! Don’t want just a specific keyword, but want the varitations from it? You can do it now!

And yes, there is more. Now there is a search query report in the report center. you can move around keywords and exclude keywords based on the results of some query. That’s going to be fun to play with.

Ask.com
It’s Ask.com’s turn. Just a boring as the others. I was sad about this, there was nothing of note. And I was looking forward to hearing from Ask.

QA
This was difficult and not really worth it because the people asking questions were in very specific industries and situtations. Not applicable to everyone.