At least fifty times a year, a lovely person encountered somewhere else in the world hears me talk and asks point blank, “Are you Canadian?”. After so many years of living in Minnesota, it seems I pronounce, “boat” as “boot,” “about” as “aboot” and “Thunder Bay” as “Tunder Bay.” OMG, how can this be true?! After all, I’m from Boston (Bahston) where we pahk the cah in Havahd Yahd. It’s true that some places in Minnesota are technically further south than Toronto… and I’ve been in MN for 20 years, but what have things come to?!
All northern kidding aside and removing tongue from cheek, AIMCLEAR has deep Canadian history. With smart friends like Andrew Goodman, Jeff Quipp, Jennifer Osborne, Alan Knecht, Miranda Miller, Jim Hedger and Gord Hotchkiss, we know to look north of the border for digital marketing inspiration. Canada is a serious place for analytics, particularly competitive monitoring. Both Radian6 (acquired by SalesForce in 2011) and Sysomos (AIMCLEAR‘s fave) were founded in Canada. Yep, heat rises and that’s particularly true when it comes to digital marketing genius radiating over North America.
Of our Canadian relationships, none is longer term and deeper than AIMCLEAR‘s association with Marc Poirier, CEO & Co-Founder of Acquisio. Over the years, various clients have used Acquisio PPC performance marketing tools and the reports are undeniably gorgeous. More than that, Marc has been an unconditional industry friend to AIMCLEAR and me. Like Moz (also dear friends), Acquisio’s roots lay in the agency world. Both agencies created wonderful agency tools, the value thereof transcending valuation of the agencies. Thus, both left managed services behind, for the most part, and morphed into digital marketing SaaS tools.
So, imagine the pleasure of an invitation to keynote Acquisio’s annual “Summit,” which takes place in Montreal, “La Métropole du Québec,” for two days this week. This year’s Summit takes place right before Montreal’s world famous Osheaga music festival, which begins Friday, July 31st, right after the Summit wraps up. Things will be jumping in “La ville au cent clochers,” French for “The City of a Hundred Steeples.”
Speaker Highlights
There are a number of groovy speakers over the two-day event. Here are some features from our perspective. These are the folks I’d personally go anywhere to hear.
M
arc Poirier, Co-Founder and newly appointed CEO of Acquisio, will share about the state of the SEM and PPC industry. It’s worth the price of admission to hear this futurist prognosticate. Those using the tool will be interested to hear, from Marc’s perspective, where Acquisio fits within the industry. Plus, be one of the first to hear of the changes in store for Acquisio, including new releases, projects and, most importantly, the updated company direction. Marc assures us there will be no sales pitch here.
Popular author, 
speaker, serial entrepreneur and marketing consultant Brad Geddes will give a detailed look into effective ad testing and optimization, providing Summit attendees a look into his latest business venture, AdAlysis, the first ever scalable ad testing technology. I’ve had the pleasure of hanging out with Brad all over the world — from Sydney to London, San Francisco to New York. We’ve become friends.
John Lee, Managing Partner at Clix Marketing, is a search marketing professional with experience in PPC, display advertising, social advertising, SEO and analytics. Listen in as John Lee discusses optimization with automation, including the best of AdWords scripts, rules, Bing’s new automation and more. AIMCLEAR and Clix go way back. John’s a rising thought leader and perfectly geeky.
Bryan Minor’s entire career has been focused on developing algorithms. In Feb 2007 Bryan came up with the concept for AdMetrica for optimizing Google Display advertising. Initial testing of these ideas resulted in the first test client accounts using BBM (Bid & Budget Management) in Feb 2013. BBM continues to grow, with tens of thousands of clients using it successfully every day. PLUS, we always love a dude wearing a lab coat in his headshot!
We asked Marc Poirier why Acquisio believes BBM is better than other algorithms. Here’s what he had to say:
“The BBM algorithm sports the fastest (48 adjustments per day on hundreds of millions of bids with results often observed within hours, not months), most accurate (spend targets are normally met well above 99% accuracy, true for the world’s largest accounts, and even for very small local accounts) and most likely the most scaled out bid and budget management technology (more than 12,500 accounts controlled by BBM and we’re just getting started). BBM Search campaigns are 3.5 times more likely to spend their Daily Budget than ‘non-BBM’ campaigns. And while doing this they spend 40% less per CPC”
—Marc Poirier—
We can vouch for that. AIMCLEAR uses BBM for some clients and the results are as Marc advertises, for the right kind of accounts.
Patrick Tam is the Strategic Partner Manager for SEM & Platform Partnerships at Google. He’s spent the past four years at Google partnering with digital marketing companies and ad-tech platforms that help accelerate and improve access to Google’s marketing technology for millions of local advertisers. His work is focused on helping companies build top-of-class marketing solutions that stretch across SEM, display, video and analytics. I’m looking forward to hearing Patrick speak.
Frederick Vallaeys was one of the first 500 employees at Google where he helped grow the AdWords search marketing system and served as Google’s AdWords Evangelist. He was a key player in the development of AdWords Editor, Quality Scores, Google Analytics and more. He has contributed his technical expertise to several books including bestsellers like “AdWords for Dummies,” “Advanced Google AdWords” and more. Recognized as one of the top PPC experts by PPC Hero, Vallaeys is a regular contributor and speaker for major industry publications and events internationally. I’ve known Fred for years. AIMCLEAR has worked with him and considers him a friend.
As for the keynote, on 4 p.m. on Thursday July 30 I’ll be discussing deep integration of search and social.
It’s true. “Big data,” “psychographics,” “retargeting” and “personas” are already overused toss-around buzz terms with numerous, fuzzy meanings. Attend this session for a pragmatic look past frenzied rhetoric into targeting that pays. We’ll go on a practical journey to learn more about
- First-touch social psychographic data
- Team curated cookie pools for performance marketers to exploit
- Advanced psychographic audience targeting and more!
Yep, I’ve lived in Minnesota for most of my adult life, so close to Canada apparently that my speech patterns betray geographic proximity. AIMCLEAR would not trade its relationships with Canadian thought leaders for all the tea in England, all the Barramundi fillets on Sydney’s Bondi Beach or for any Chinatown — anywhere.
We hope to see you in Montreal.
Image Copyright:Â Shutterstock, Songquan Deng, Â hektor2
