SearchFest 2013 last Friday was a huge success! It was truly a great event with some amazing speakers like Marty Weintraub, Ross Hudgens, Adam Audette, Joanna Lord, Rand Fishkin and Ian Lurie to name a few. It has been a few years since my last SearchFest, but this year the conference was at an all time high catering to an intermediate to advanced audience. For me, a conference’s success is based on how many nuggets I can take back to my team and this conference there were too many good learnings to count. So, I’m going to share with you my top 5 from the PPC track.

1. Advertisers can use trademarked names in display URLs and Google won’t disapprove the ad(s).
2. Profit Per Impression – Instead of only managing PPC campaigns to CPA and ROAS, look at the Profit Per Impression (PPI) metric to have a balance between volume and margins.
3. Use PPC ad text best practices for on-page Meta tag optimization. I know this isn’t anything new, but it was a good reminder. Use uppercase letters in the Meta descriptions, obviously use your target keywords so they can be bolded in the SERPs and use trademark symbols.
4. Facebook Ads pointing to Facebook Pages – Don’t forget, you can now change the title of your FB ads that point to FB pages. Before, advertisers could not change this and FB would automatically place the name of your FB page in the ad title.
5. Facebook Custom Audiences – Take advantage of this! Using Power Editor, you can dump your email list into Facebook and create custom audiences to target in FB.

For more information regarding SearchFest, check out the SEMpdx’s site.