Overview

Which third-party platforms are marketers using to promote and sell their goods? What are the biggest advertising challenges and opportunities of 2020? What does the future hold for digital commerce and how can marketers stay competitive in an ever-shifting ecosystem? Get the answers to these and more crucial questions in this opening keynote, hosted by Search Engine Land Editor-in-Chief, Ginny Marvin:

• Hear new data from Marketing Land's Digital Commerce Advertising Survey that shows just how marketers are spending on platforms like Amazon. You'll gain an invaluable overview of where we are now and actionable insights to prepare for what's next.
• Be the first to see the 2020 Periodic Table of Digital Commerce Marketing, a new tool from Search Engine Land that marketers can use to navigate the many elements of marketing products online. This must-have resource will empower you to create compelling digital commerce campaigns and optimize existing ones.
• Explore the intersection of SEO, PPC and social in regards to increasing digital commerce sales during a candid, fireside chat with Dana Tan, Global SEO Manager at Under Armour and Benjamin Spiegel, Chief Digital Officer, Global Beauty, for Procter & Gamble. You'll gain first-hand knowledge from these market leaders who know what it takes to succeed and are ready to share.

Overview

After this session, you'll be able to:

• Understand why it's not one number, but a time continuum, that Google cares about
• Walk through each metric and describe what they each mean
• Audit your page speed by replicating specific examples
• Successfully talk to developers and product managers about page speed

Overview

After this session, you'll be able to:

• Understand why you shouldn't diverge from your site's core profile
• Determine how the tone of your website impacts your authority and true intentions
• Think more holistically about authority and consider the overall alignment of purpose, use of UI elements, and so on to deal with Google's new approach to content

Overview

After this session, you'll be able to:

• Understand how to run effective top-of-funnel (TOFU) search marketing campaigns get your products and services in front of new customers early in their consideration process
• Know when to leverage TOFU paid search campaigns
• Implement strategies and best practices for setting up and managing TOFU campaigns
• Know what to expect for performance and how to measure it
• Understand attribution models across the sales funnel

Overview

During this lively roundtable session, you'll be able to:

• Have an honest discussion about how marketers are using automation, when and why they have abandoned it, and how they are creating their own systems.
• Discuss why these two sentiments are common when discussing PPC automation: Automation is great, we should automate more. Automation isn't working and we've had to stop it.
• Ask questions - this is an open roundtable discussion, so all your questions are welcome!

Overview

After this session, you'll be able to:

• Build and smartly manage Shopping Accounts in 2020
• Set up multi-country feeds and campaigns (it's easier than ever to go international with Shopping Ads)
• Grow your individual skills to become a more valuable Shopping Ads Practitioner in the world of Smart Shopping

Overview

After this session, you'll be able to:

• Structure your team for faster implementation
• Build a team that allows each member to showcase their individual strengths
• Arrange your team around product ownership and get in line with your entire organization
• Help your project manager get buy-in from the organization to allow product recommendations to be executed
• Understand how to build trust across your organization to support SEO initiatives
• Get everyone in your organization to think as they are part of the SEO team

Overview

After this session, you'll be able to:

• Understand nofollow and snippet rules
• Describe what has changed with these attributes and what you should do with them
• Know whether or not people are adopting the new tag (ahref data)
• Speculate how Google may use the data
• Determine how Google may have to drive adoption

Overview

After this session you will be able to:

• Know the pros and cons of popular structures like alpha/beta, SKAG, and GriP
• Understand how your structure impacts the performance of modern automations like Smart Bidding from Google
• Deploy free automations that help maintain your target structure in a dynamic environment
• Work with free tools from the search engines to analyze data in a way that makes sense to your business, even when your account structure doesn't follow those same patterns

Overview

After this session, you'll be able to:

• Understand the most important content and elements to include on landing pages
• Analyze and audit your own landing pages to know what's working and what's not
• Build and test landing pages that search engines favor (therefore, ones that generate more clicks and higher conversion rates)

Overview

After this session, you'll be able to:

• Understand what keyword cannibalization is and why is it such a problem for eCommerce SEOs
• Recognize the most common types of cannibalization seen on eCommerce stores and how to identify these using Google Search Console and Data Studio
• Solve cannibalization issues including 301 redirects, canonicalization, content consolidation and re-optimizing pages
• Change workflows to prevent such problems happening in the future by working through a simple checklist when launching new products, categories or blog posts

Overview

After this session, you'll be able to:

• Understand the direct and indirect factors that influence Amazon's A9 Algorithm — and use them to your advantage
• Describe sales velocity and content's role in ranking on Amazon
• Discuss how advertising plays into the ranking algorithm

Overview

In this session, you'll:

• Use insights from search to drive product innovation, R&D, communications and design
• Extract insights from free tools like Google Trends and create insightful recommendations for your product and R&D teams
• Understand how manufacturers and companies use social listening to create new brands and product lines

Overview

During this hands-on, PowerPoint-free Q&A session, you'll be able to:

• Volunteer your site to be audited in real-time by a panel of experts
• Discover the root causes of your challenges and actionable steps to overcome them
• Ask seasoned SEO veterans your burning questions on all-things organic

Overview

After this session, you'll be able to:

• Create a healthy, productive environment in which SEO and web developers can collectively thrive
• Implement best practices for engaging with developers to implement technical SEO initiatives (hreflang, structured data, XML sitemaps, etc.)
• Show the value of your SEO team to developers so that they want to interact with your team as much as possible

Overview

After this session, you'll be able to:

• Implement SEO best practices for crawling and site architecture
• Understand Webmaster Tools to get the most out of Bing search
• Know what's new and coming up in Bing Webmaster Tools
• Understand recent launches from Google

Overview

After this session, you'll be able to:

• Understand and generate insights about your B2B audiences on Facebook
• Optimize results by filtering out anomalies from real data
• Build on success, using retargeting, lookalikes, and audiences from LinkedIn and your website to make your Facebook campaigns work harder

Overview

After this session, you'll be able to:

• Understand the correlation between audience and ad testing
• Know how to interpret GDN and YouTube ad tests
• Take ad test results and make them executable for ongoing media
• Efficiently test variables beyond just the creative and messaging
• Adjust your testing process to accommodate Messaging/ETA vs. RSA, call only and other formats rolling out from Google
• Use campaign experiments and ad variants in Google Ads to make testing more manageable, for accounts both large and small

Overview

After this session, you'll be able to:

• Drive sales on Amazon with a detailed, full funnel, and organized strategy
• Make the business case for Amazon Ads and overcome internal hesitation
• Use hidden features in the Amazon Search Platform to win more engagement
• Navigate Amazon Search while using Amazon Product Display to enrich your audience pool and close the loop
• Clean and organize ASINs and account structure

Overview

After this session, you'll be able to:

• Understand what Google BERT is and where it came from
• Discuss how natural language understanding is developing and how you can utilize co-occurrence to disambiguate your search strategy
• Know how search engines may be utilizing Google BERT and its implications for search marketers
• Understand why you cannot optimize SEO for the Google BERT algorithm update
• Harness the power of Google BERT as a tool to improve your SEO efficiency and contextual relevance (complete with real-world examples)
• Understand BERT's successor ALBERT

Overview

After this session, you'll be able to:

• Understand that Google's index before render is important in the face of JavaScript-driven websites and apps (e.g. React, Angular, Vue)
• Avoid indexing problems by knowing how Google applies filters and limitations before rendering
• Deliver different HTML per page, even other page attributes (page URL, title, canonical, etc.), since Google won't render pages with limited differences

Overview

After this session, you'll be able to:

• Understand your potential customer by stepping out of the digital marketer silo and talking with your sales and customer service teams
• Ask time-tested questions that provide answers you can quickly apply to messaging and targeting
• Think beyond search to audience-focused targeting, in order to zero in on precise B2B audiences
• Go beyond bottom funnel targeting to build demand at the top
• Use tools such as Answer the Public, internal site search, competitor keywords, RLSA + broad match, organic search queries in Search Console and more to fine better keyword ideas for niche B2B terms

Overview

After this session, you'll be able to:

• Optimize success with both Microsoft Ads and Google Ads
• Implement specific tactics and tips to optimize your Google Ads campaigns
• Build a unique and scaleable strategy for your Microsoft Ads campaigns
• Define the subtle, but important differences between Google and Microsoft settings and targeting options

Overview

After this session, you'll be able to:

• Make the most of your seasonal periods by developing a year-long strategy
• Plan budgets and creatives for the most active times of year for your brand
• Implement new tactics like bidding levers in the platforms to increase seasonal performance

Overview

During this hands-on, PowerPoint-free Q&A session, you'll be able to:

• Volunteer your site to be audited in real-time by a panel of experts
• Discover the root causes of your challenges and actionable steps to overcome them
• Ask seasoned Amazon SEO veterans your burning questions

Overview

After this session, you'll be able to:

• Understand why the Quality Rater Guidelines are crucial
• Know what Google considers to be signs of both high and low quality sites and pages
• Describe what Google's quality raters are, why they uses raters and what impact they have on the live search results
• Define E-A-T (expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness), articulate why is it so important and why Google cares
• Understand the importance of reputation for websites and Google's new emphasis on creator reputation
• Know what Google considers to be Your Money Your Life pages (YMYL), and what Google wants for these types of pages to rank well

Overview

After this session, you'll be able to:

• Understand various paradigms of non-curated and curated voice search and understand the value of each
• Build and deploy a voice search solution, measure its impact, and continuously optimize for performance with case studies and reports
• Understand common use cases (as well as negative use cases) for voice SEO
• Leverage existing local SEO efforts to capture potential high-value voice queries
• Integrate voice search across the entire customer journey

Overview

After this session, you'll be able to:

• Understand different LinkedIn targeting types, common pitfalls to avoid, and how large audiences should be for each stage of the funnel
• Take advantage of LinkedIn's frequency caps on ads and leverage the bidding strategy that will get you the most clicks of the lowest CPCs
• Identify the CTAs that perform best on LinkedIn and use proven strategies for Lead Gen ads
• Get the most out of high CPCs and get the most bang for your buck across all other ad platforms

Overview

After this session, you'll be able to:

• Understand behavioral economics and how it can be applied to digital advertising
• Use certain channels such as display, online video and others to 'prime' a user, build awareness and continuously touch a potential customer along their journey
• Activate a customer when it is time to buy through 'prompting'
• Improve creative and timing of ad placement to prompt users at the time that matters most

Overview

After this session, you'll be able to:

• Understand the key differences between (1) on-page SEO for product pages and (2) product detail page SEO for e-commerce sites like Amazon, Walmart, and others
• Apply best practices gleaned from original, large-scale research on the real-world viability of ranking for e-commerce categories, faceted search and product detail pages
• Apply actionable tactics for each key SEO factor to help achieve optimal product detail page SEO and show up in search against big e-commerce competitors

Overview

During this hands-on, PowerPoint-free Q&A session, you'll be able to:

• Volunteer your site to be audited in real-time by a panel of experts
• Discover the root causes of your challenges and actionable steps to overcome them
• Ask seasoned veterans your burning questions on all-things about Google Analytics

Overview

After this session, you will be able to:

• Understand why link building is one of the biggest ranking factors for Google... and one of the hardest things to do
• Avoid shortcuts that can get you in trouble, methods that are no longer suggested, and techniques that can get you penalized
• Measure and report on the value of backlinks
• Create and market content that can earn backlinks

Overview

After this session, you will be able to:

• Understand how search engines render and see your content and extract structured data to power rich experiences
• Discover tools and resources that can help you to easily generate and test structured markup
• Increase the likelihood of you content displaying as rich-results, which have been found to increase click-through rate
• Fully realize the role semantic markup plays in determining the searcher experience and what types of schema you should use for best results

Overview

After this session, you will be able to:

• Understand the minimum amount of data you should capture for effective SEM campaigns
• Use 1st party data to inform Smart Bidding
• Easily optimize your campaigns based on LTV or other business metrics
• Identify what leaks in your sales process can tell you about your search campaigns
• Prevent "analysis paralysis" and know when it's best to trust directional data

Overview

After this session, you'll be able to:

• Identify what to automate in your campaigns and what will improve your top and/or bottom lines
• Know how, when and why you should push back on recommendations from search engine reps
• Leverage automation tools and processes in an enterprise-level environment
• Measure and evaluate performance of your automation initiatives

Overview

After this session, you'll be able to:

• Differentiate between TrueView In-stream and TrueView Discovery Ads
• Understand what actions users can take while ads are playing, what creative works, and what conversions you can push for each format
• Test different messages depending on video creative, audience targets, and ad formats
• Utilize companion banners, TrueView for Shopping, TrueView for Action, Ad Sequencing, Earned Actions, and more to build next-step strategies to push more conversions

Overview

After this session, you will be able to:

• Identify featured snippet and People Also Ask (PAA) opportunities
• Understand featured snippets/PAA's impact on Google search result pages
• Develop a system for building out SEO strategies aimed at winning featured snippet/PAA opportunities
• Track and measure the effectiveness of your efforts in wining featured snippet/PAA opportunities

Overview

After this session, you'll be able to:

• Understand how search engines are evolving from a crawl to a push model by adopting Bing's content submission API, which crawls both top websites and content management systems
• Plan for the new evergreen Bingbot, which is now rendering all webpages using the same underlying technology already used today by Googlebot, Google Chrome, and other Chromium-based browsers
• Understand limits with crawling and rendering JavaScript– including with the new evergreen Rendering Engines from Bing and Google

Overview

After this session, you will be able to:

• Understand why auditing your campaigns is so difficult
• Identify the most common and hidden problems with yours campaigns
• Know what to look for as causes of performance issues
• Create a year-over-year or month-over-month analysis

Overview

After this session, you'll be able to:

• Spend less time reporting and more time analyzing and finding insights
• Minimize the effects of a cookie loss in an ITP world
• Reduce the fractured nature of reporting with a clear measurement strategy
• Use CAM methodology (Contemplate, Automate, Mitigate) to improve your reporting
• Know what's really hot (and useful!) in reporting

Overview

After this session, you'll be able to:

• Minimize CPCs with audience sizes, including tips for using CBO appropriately, placements and structure that can improve CPCs, and effective audience building
• Maximize CTR to improve CPCs with creative optimizations proven to drive more engagement including learnings around animation, persuasive copy, and iterating off of proven winners
• Maximize CVR with strong audience-destination alignment, clearly highlighted value props, and balancing educational information with distractions that impact conversions

Overview

After this session, you'll be able to:

• Define Peter Morville's UX Honeycomb and understand why it crucial
• Understand how E-A-T directly corresponds with specific parts of the UX Honeycomb
• Implement actionable tactics that support overlapping E-A-T & UX Honeycomb items
• Implement tactics to improve your site's overall E-A-T and user experience
• Create a web presence that is positive for both the searcher (user) and by extension, the search results provider (Google)
• Know the importance of (1) being up front with who you are and what you can provide (expertise), (2) only providing information your user needs and wants on topics you can cover authoritatively (authority), and (3) spotlighting feedback from real people (trust)

Overview

After this session, you'll be able to:

• Make the most of the Google My Business listing with photos, content and question an answer (Q&A) features
• Effectively optimize images in your GMB listing including the use of captions
• Understand what types of images to upload and the how often to upload new ones
• Determine what types of content to use for your business description and how often to change it
• Know what to post in the questions and answers Q&A feature and tips for keeping them fresh during critical moments such as events and holidays

Overview

After this session, you'll be able to:

• Plot your career by understanding the advantages and disadvantages of an agency vs in–house path
• Manage needy clients, colleagues, and bosses more effectively
• Prevent burnout for yourself and your employees
• Avoid getting pigeon-holed by investing in learning and growth
• Understand that your concerns and issues are "not just you" — and that colleagues face similar issues

Overview

After this session, you'll be able to:

• Design the perfect customer experience by combining the "Job To Be Done" theory with conversion rate optimization best practices
• Create offers that customers would be willing to pay a premium price for
• Unearth the true motivations that persuade a customer to buy from you or walk away

Overview

After this session, you'll be able to:

• Use step-by-step procedures to prepare your digital store to accommodate shifts in inventory
• Future-proof your product listings and their informational silos by understanding the pros and cons of nested brand/category URLs, and the importance of logical navigational paths to the success of product-category and brand-category pages
• Optimize product-category and brand-category pages to accommodate shifts in inventory by creating experiences around topics and creating "evergreen" product and category pages that help with the retention of rankings and traffic while guiding users along their product discovery journey

Overview

During this hands-on, PowerPoint-free Q&A session, you'll be able to:

• Discuss a variety of approaches to solve your biggest technical SEO challenges
• Collaborate with other technical SEO experts in answering people's questions
• Determine the best way to measure if a technical SEO project was successful

Overview

After this session, you will be able to:

• Write a title tag that captures attention and drives clicks
• Write a meta description that maximizes CTR
• Strategically align URLs and breadcrumbs for maximum SERP impact

Overview

After this session, you'll be able to:

• Understand the image search landscape and maximize your opportunities
• Optimize, mark up and load images for maximum search traffic
• Audit image media on your pages and on your site at scale
• Analyze and report on image search performance

Overview

After this session, you'll be able to:

• Optimize your YouTube video's metadata to rank for your target keyword
• Create a compelling video thumbnail
• Get your self-hosted videos in Google's video carousel

Overview

After this session, you'll be able to:

• Understand how Google views the "spam ecosystem" and how that differs from what marketers see
• Implement tactics that can be used to fight spam for yourself and your clients
• Know what to NOT do when fighting spam (i.e., what is a waste of time, what's valuable, etc.)
• Understand Google's strategic shift toward a greater verticalization of the consumer experience for local maps
• Know how Google's verticalized experiences affects hotels and travel, service professionals, and restaurants
• Implement actionable tactics that require special attention outside of standard GMB optimization for key verticals

Overview

After this session, you'll be able to:

• Master the creative matrix, fusing art and science in marketing and social strategies
• Use data and automation to free up time for creative thinking
• Replicate examples of how to use data-backed creativity in your own social campaigns

Overview

After this session, you'll be able to:

• Leverage N-Gram analysis to identify new insights for your paid campaigns
• Execute an entirely new way to take market share from your competition
• Crack the code on brand awareness-based campaigns that influence your ideal customers

Overview

At the end of this session, you'll be able to:

• Manage your PPC campaigns on margins across product lines
• Create rules of engagement within the organization to prevent cross-bidding
• Build and manage in-house PPC teams

Overview

After this session, you'll be able to:

• Use filters to quickly find and eliminate trouble spots, specifically placements and search terms reports
• Know when you can aggregate data to make decisions and move forward and when you probably shouldn't
• Implement automated alerts/tools to notify you when enough data has accumulated to make an informed decision

Overview

After this session, you'll be able to:

• Know which creative and ad formats work best with Discovery Ads
• Effectively segment your products to make sure your ads are seen by the right audience every time
• Know what levers can you pull to optimize your efforts, despite Google having 90% of the control of your campaigns through machine learning

Overview

After this session, you'll be able to:

• Understand consumers' motivations when using a product: their functional, emotional and social needs
• Realize why most strategies are not strategies at all: they are either project plans towards a goal or superficial marketing slogans that add little value
• Be able to create a digital strategy that avoids leaving products or services vulnerable to customers who cannot distinguish them from competitor offerings

Overview

After this session, you will be able to:

• List what Walmart's offerings are today in the advertising space
• Understand how Walmart's sponsored products ad unit works
• Explore what Walmart's unique capabilities and challenges are
• Take next steps if Walmart Advertising is right for you

Overview

During this hands-on, PowerPoint-free Q&A session, you'll be able to:

• Volunteer your site to be audited in real-time by a panel of experts
• Discover the root causes of your challenges and actionable steps to overcome them
• Ask seasoned SEM veterans your burning questions on all-things paid

Overview

After this session, you'll be able to:

• Understand the playing field you're on — what your competitors are doing and which possibilities you should examine
• Demonstrate how to structure your digital investment to generate the highest possible ROI
• Know when to expand your spend and when to hold the line and save yourself headaches

Overview

After this session, you'll be able to:

• Create a video first content strategy to double your amount of unique content
• Implement YouTube SEO techniques to rank your videos in both Google and YouTube search and drive more traffic to your site
• Design a system to consistently produce video content for any budget

Overview

After this session, you'll be able to:

• Ensure everyone knows why and how to leverage features, benefits and calls to action throughout the buying funnel
• Evaluate search results to highlight what you competition is up to so you can address the strengths and weaknesses with your ads
• Create ads that fit with advanced ad options, such as if/default ads or with sophisticated targeting such as demographics, in-market and various audience lists

Overview

After this session, you'll be able to:

• Run A/B tests on Pinterest shown to scale a D2C brand to $50,000/month in ad spend
• Get access to the Pinterest Propel team and understand the Pinterest community to help you scale your efforts and stay ahead of the pack as you test next ad formats and launch shopping campaigns.
• Evaluate Snapchat's opportunities for commerce marketing, including feedbased Shoppable Snap Ads

Overview

During this hands-on, PowerPoint-free Q&A session, you'll be able to:

• Volunteer your site to be audited in real-time by a panel of experts
• Discover the root causes of your content challenges and actionable steps to overcome them
• Understand if your content is actually solving your customers problems
• Ask seasoned content marketing veterans your burning questions on all-things content as it relates to search

Overview

After this session, you'll be able to:

• Evaluate SEM and SEO Data as one data set to impact overall performance
• Replicate examples of how other companies' SEO and PPC teams are collaborating to help them set up cadence for working together
• Make recommendations to standardize metrics between SEO and SEM
• Create meaningful SEO and SEM reports for stakeholders
• Understand the impact of on-site technical updates on paid search (positive and negative)
• Understand the impact of content updates on paid search (positive and negative)

Overview

After this session, you'll be able to:

• Understand what great content is through analyzing case studies, and learning what works, and what doesn't
• Generate new content that is both useful and engages with your audience
• Supercharge your SEO by refreshing older content

Overview

During this hands-on, PowerPoint-free Q&A session, you'll be able to:

• Volunteer your site to be audited in real-time by a panel of experts
• Discover the root causes of your landing pages challenges and actionable steps to overcome them
• Ask seasoned SEO veterans your burning questions on all-things landing page optimization

Overview

After this session, you'll be able to:

• Understand current and emerging challenges for attribution implement best practice mitigation approaches
• Identify and prioritize attribution gaps with a strategic metric-impact framework
• Implement a method for calibrating multi-touch attribution measurement with direct market signals
• Navigate the complexity of translating digital traffic to showroom visits
• Manage your Google Analytics data for a better look at multi-channel conversions
• Map out where different channels map to different parts of a journey

Overview

After this session, you'll be able to:

• Understand why it's critical to align customer vision, goals, buyers' journeys, marketing strategies in RACE format, and expected KPI impact
• Determine what KPIs you need to measure across the customer journey
• Create reports showcasing critical KPIs and a combination of various channels to show full customer journey maps

Overview

Overview

After this session, you'll be able to:

• Understand what entities are as they relate to search, based on Google patents
• Understand the rise of machine learning (specifically the BERT algorithm) and how entities impact its core functioning
• Apply entities knowledge when creating content and executing SEO with word orders, hierarchies and schema

Overview

After this session, you'll be able to:

• Develop high-quality product detail pages that delight customers, increase conversions and rank well in search results
• Know how to structure and lay out information in product detail pages for maximum utility
• Have a model of the functionality and elements users and search engines expect from high-quality product detail pages
• Understand various types of keyword research that go into great product detail pages

Overview

After this session, you'll be able to:

• Create and identify "Hand Raiser" moments (those moments when customers ask for more information) in your digital customer journey
• Build customer segments to guide prospects towards Hand Raiser moments
• Optimize SEM campaigns to maximize Hand Raiser engagements

Overview

After this session, you will be able to:

• Fully grasp commerce opportunities on social platforms beyond Facebook
• Know how to maximize sales through different social placements and unique targeting by platform
• Recognize the importance of fluid budgets when it comes to social-based commerce
• Understand why product feeds are crucial when driving sales on social

Overview

After this session, you'll be able to:

• Use Smart Bidding in B2B campaigns through seasonal swings in demand
• List the advantages of a Smart Bidding approach in B2B
• Understand the importance of audiences and apply them in Smart Bidding

Overview

After this session, you'll be able to:

• Understand what's on the horizon for digital commerce
• Discuss creative, next-gen approaches to shopping campaigns
• Take advantage of the latest tools and platform capabilities

Overview

Don't leave before it's over! We've compiled some of the most fascinating takeaways from SMX West into an entertaining and highly-informative closing session. A handful of our speakers will share their top ideas, tips and techniques to remember as you return to the office and implement the knowledge you gained at the show. It's the perfect way to wrap up two incredible days of learning!