SMX Toronto: tools, search and dollar bills

SMX Toronto is now in the books, I thought I may share some of my experiences on some of the topics that were covered during the event. All in all, it was great to be there and it was definitely refreshing to meet up with other agencies & clients and share ideas about some of the things we do as search engine professionals.  Here are my observations.

The number of paid search management tools available is absolutely insane

There are literally dozens and dozens of paid search tools available, the last session of the first day covered a large number of them. Some of the tools I already knew about, but two of them caught my eye:

Logic 361: this is a tool for managing really large PPC accounts. In a nutshell, it helps you prioritize which areas of your accounts that need a bit of patching up and provides you with insights. A couple of SMXers spoke very highly of this tool.

Adgooroo: the one thing that really caught my eye about this tool was its ability to help you with PPC budgets forecasting. Anyone who’s ever attempted budget previsions using the AdWords Keyword tool understands how difficult this can be.

Wordstream: I’ve seen this product before, basically it organizes your account structures into niches. I would be curious to see how it performs in other languages.

Other presented tools included: Magnetic, ClickPath, Aperture, Linkscape, Keyword Lizard and the list goes on. Basically if you have a PPC need, there’s probably a tool out there for you. I really enjoyed that session!

Global search strategies is a big mystery

Ok I was on that panel, so may be tempted to say it was the best panel, I was great and bla bla. But I won’t. I’ll let the social sphere decide.

One of the things that really came out of this panel was the fact that global search strategies are a largely untapped topic. I can only agree; try looking for that subject over the web, you might get an article or two, but that will be about it. This is a topic we as a Montreal-based company take very seriously, because we are confronted with these challenges every day.

Search is definitely part of the marketing strategy

As covered by Jean-François here, one of the sessions talked about how advertisers are now integrating search into their marketing strategy. It’s really cool to see how much search has evolved in terms of importance within organizations. A couple of years ago, companies were reluctant at adopting these channels in a serious manner. Nowadays, search is a must!

Wrapping-up

Ok there’s still lots of ground that could be covered, but I’m going to keep that for other blog posts. It was a lot of fun to be there, big thumbs up to the organizers who did a great job!