Yesterday at SMX London was full of information and handy tips on Paid Search and Analytics. There were four sessions: Winning The Click: Creating Great Paid Search Ads - giving tips on writing CTR raising ad text. Winning the Conversions - how to build landing pages to make the most of your traffic Complying and Coping in the New World of Regulated Global Marketing Environment - talking about the Cookie Law and privacy concerns Overlooked,

Last Thursday was the first Search Firestarters event, hosted by Google and Only Dead Fish - and we were lucky enough to get an invitation. Here are our top takeaways! Martin McNulty, from Forward3D Don't try to attribute your way out of a rubbish marketing campaign. If your marketing is rubbish no attribution model will fix that. Modelling is not measuring - it's about statistics and odds.

Google announced new matching behaviour just over a week ago, nicknamed 'near exact and phrase': exact keywords will match misspellings and 'close variants', and phrase keywords will cover searches containing misspellings or close variants of the phrase. It's not live yet )and won't be until mid-May( but the setting for the new behaviour is already available in all campaigns and is switched on by default. So, should you opt in or out?

Continuing our coverage of April's BrightonSEO, here's a write-up of 'Microformats and SEO': a talk given by Glenn Jones , a founder and director of Madgex. His slides are available here . Search engines are interested in getting structured data from websites for better user experience in searching. Google uses them for rich snippets in the search results, to show things like ratings and author pictures. There are three different ways to markup structured data.

Excel is one of the best tools for PPC. Downloading your data into Excel gives much more scope for analysis and complex change than using a browser interface or AdWords Editor. You may have already read Distilled's Excel for SEO or some of PPCHero's Excel tips , but here are my own hints. Concatenation If there's one thing you can put into practice from this post, it is this: you can use ampersands instead of CONCATENATE)( . A1&A2 is the same as CONCATENATE)A1,A2(,

Earlier in the week Google announced changes to its privacy policies . The main changes are that: Now nearly all Google products are covered by one privacy policy. Information you give Google's various different services can be combined. Google still promises not to sell personal data, but to only share aggregated, non-personally identifiable information. It hasn't announced that it's collecting information it wasn't before,

So you're advertising on Google, but you want to branch out to Bing? There's a new audience for you there, with less competition and less cost! Microsoft adCenter is in many ways similar to AdWords. Your ads appear on searches that match your positive keywords but not your negative keywords. Your account contains campaigns, which contain ad groups, which contain keywords and ads.

Read the First 58 Takeaways from Conversion Conference London? Here are the next 65, from the afternoon of the first day. Confessions of a Conversion Rate Optimiser The afternoon kicked off with a keynote by Bryan Eisenberg , who has been in the conversion optimisation business since 1998. Conversion rates have increased little over the past decade. Every site has a conversion problem.

There were many great tips at Conversion Conference London last week - too many to fit into one blog post. Here are the first 58 takeaways from the first day. More to come soon! Mobile and Real Time Optimisation The conference started with Amy Africa , CEO of Eight By Eight , packing many tips for mobile conversion optimisation into her forty-five minute keynote.

If your ads display on irrelevant searches, then either you get clicks and waste money )as the searchers are very unlikely to convert(, or you don't get clicks and CTR drops )which affects Quality Score and therefore your CPC(. So how do you stop this?

If you're already using paid search marketing, how can you improve your results? Here are nine tips for sharpening up your campaigns. Use conversion tracking & Google Analytics Which keywords produce what results? Which cause people to make purchases, which result in newsletter sign-ups, which drive traffic to your forum or blog? You need tracking to answer these questions. AdWords )or AdCenter( will tell you what ads searchers click,

One of our clients' sites had a sudden drop in traffic from London. After the 25 th of February, all London traffic - paid, organic and direct - had dropped by nearly 45%. There wasn't an obvious reason. There hadn't been any changes to the PPC campaigns or search rankings. It didn't look seasonal; there was nothing similar in previous years. Google announced that it was updating location targeting in AdWords earlier in February,