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Yesterday I had the pleasure of attending the google@Manchester event held at The Point, Lancashire Country Cricket Club. There were over 250 marketers in attendance, all eager to hear about Google’s innovations straight from the search giant themselves.
Here is what was discussed on the day:
It’s All About You! by Mark Howe provided an energetic introduction into what we could expect to hear later in the day. The “story” of his presentation was about his mission to Escape from Alcatraz in an open water swim in shark infested waters. By using a variation of Google tools he was able to make it back to dry land alive. He gave special mention to Google Books, Google Hotel Finder, Hangouts on Google+ and Google Street View.
The Video Revolution gave the audience a sneak peak into YouTube’s plans for the future, including new ad layouts and a TV guide style recommendation page for users who are logged in to the service. It seemed apparent that many of the new features for YouTube will be designed for logged in users, as currently the user habit is to look at a few clips before leaving the site. The “TV guide” will encourage the user to stay on the site longer.
The Connected TV panel had members from the BBC and IAB, providing a discussion around integrating the TV and internet into one device, rather than having two separate devices – neither having your full attention. What will be needed in the future to support this will be much faster internet speeds and a thirst for development from companies to get these products to the mass market.
Who Wants To Be A Millionaire was a fun way to educate the audience about data, conversions and everything else relevant to marketers. One lucky audience member went home with the prize, a Galaxy Tab, but it took a while for the two final contestants to choose different answers! The gold jackets worn by the Google guys were very fetching by the way.
Mobile – It’s Not Too Late To Be Early was a session by Amanda Rosenburg who showed us a demonstation of Android Ice Cream Sandwich (the first ever in the UK). Apart from a few bugs in some of the feature, the platform as a whole was very impressive. The ability to beam apps, articles and more to another phone in an instant is impressive, and the panaromic photo mode with immediate photo stitching is miles ahead of the current android system. One to watch.
The Full Value of Search taught us that 52% of conversion journeys are multiclick, yet 90% of advertisers use last click attribution! Shane showed us a few case studies of clients who had adjusted their attribution models and looked at other ways that online shoppers might convert, i.e. offline. He told us that it is greatly important to track these offline sales in order to see an accurate reflection of your ROI etc. (We agree – check out our call tracking technology to see which web visitors pick up the phone to your business)
AdInsight Clarity does just that. You can quickly identify your best performing online campaigns and the areas of spend that are less productive. In our Call Volume report, you might find that more of your calls come from Google Organic search instead of Google PPC; if you don’t track all of your online advertising, it would be hard to make this discovery.
