Yesterday I had the opportunity to join Amanda, Austin, and Nick to Wordstream Live 2018 at Google’s Chicago HQ. It was a day packed with presentations, keynote speakers, and a ferocious Twitter contest (congrats to Nick for winning a Google Home). The speakers from WordStream and Google were all really knowledgeable, and their presentations were fun and interactive.

As the presentations began, I immediately felt a bit out of my depth. Many of the terms and concepts used were unfamiliar to me, a fresh face in the marketing/advertising community. It was a little overwhelming when everyone would take their phones out to take a picture of an important graph or diagram, and I didn’t even know what I was looking at. At first, I took to my phone to get definitions and clear up what I couldn’t figure out myself, but that left me behind once I checked back into the presentation. I figured it best to not get hung up on the technical terms since I couldn’t learn it all in a day. I found myself less overwhelmed and a lot more engaged (caffeinated) in the next couple of speaker’s words. Turns out, I actually learned a lot.

10 Things I Learned at WordStream Live:

1. Even if someone doesn’t click on your add, Consumers still remember who you are with surprising accuracy
2. Consumers say they intentionally avoid clicking on ads, but consumers also can only tell the difference between paid and organic results about 50% of the time
3. The same consumers respond to the same ad differently depending on mobile vs. desktop
4. SEO and PPC are not mutually exclusive (for example, it allows you to appear twice on the first page of search results)
5. Search (Google) and Social (Facebook) are almost identical in terms of advertising revenue
6. Google and other search engines allow consumers to find you, while Facebook and Instagram allow you to seek out consumers
7. A/B testing is the recommended way to experiment with new ad campaigns for things like blog titles, emails, Facebook Ads, etc …
8. A great ad is useless without a solid landing page
9. You have ~3 seconds to capture a consumers attention when they visit your site.
10. Long tail keywords are becoming more popular with voice searches (Ex: cheese curds VS. best cheese curds in Milwaukee)

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