We’re quickly adding speakers and sessions to our Hero Conf London agenda, with the help of the experts at PPC Hero and Hanapin Marketing. And we’re very excited to introduce you to our opening keynoter. Sophie Newton is Director and Head of Innovation at Brainlabs, where her mission is to revolutionise paid media through mathematical marketing.
We had a chance to talk to Sophie about her upcoming keynote session, The Future of AdWords is Automated, and are thrilled to share the discussion.
Tell us about the presentation you’re working on for Hero Conf London.
I’m really excited to be opening Hero Conf 2016 and I’ll be talking about how the future of AdWords is automated. Over the last decade, PPC has shifted from being a purely marketing discipline to a much more mathematical and scientific one. Indeed there are thousands of changes to AdWords and Bing each year and every change adds a new layer of complexity, many more data points, and a much greater need for automation, which I’ll explore in my talk.
What can attendees expect to take away and implement immediately?
Coding can seem like another world, and a long way away from marketing, but actually it goes hand in hand with PPC and I’ll be demystifying the world of scripts and APIs and encourage everyone to embrace automation as the future of online advertising. Technology is instrumental in not only improving performance but also efficiency, freeing up valuable time to work on much more interesting, innovative and insightful projects. In particular, at Brainlabs automation has impacted every aspect of account management, from reporting and account fail safes to budgeting and bid management. I’ll talk about my tricks of the trade and present some ideas to get people thinking about all the possible ways to use technology to solve their business challenges.
What would you describe as you biggest PPC mistake and what did you learn from it?
During the early days, I accidentally changed a bid to £600 instead of £6! Fortunately I checked the account about an hour later and could quickly correct my mistake. It taught me a valuable lesson in the importance of checking (especially immediately and repeatedly after a campaign launch) and I constantly go on about this to everyone at Brainlabs! But humans can only check so much so we’re worked a lot to build a suite of automated tools to check across our whole portfolio for errors and anomalies – tech has saved the day many times!
Do you have a blog post or a single piece you’ve written that best illustrates your point of view?
One of my favourite projects has been developing the Brainlabs ad scheduling tool, which allows advertisers to bid 24 times a day, 7 days a week. This gets around the AdWords limitation of only 6 daily bidding windows and is 4 times more responsive than any other bid management tool. Recently we’ve updated the technology to set different ad schedules for desktop/tablet and mobile, and with the introduction of tablet bids in the not too distant future, we’re already primed to publish a new version of the tech with ad schedules for each device. Watch this space!
If you could have one super-power, what would it be and why?
I would love to be able to teleport so that I could see my family in New Zealand without having to travel 25 hours on a plane!
We’ll be rolling out the rest of the schedule for Hero Conf London throughout July. We’ve already sold nearly 50% of our tickets. Act now to ensure your seat at London’s Only All-PPC Event, 24-26 October at etc.venues St Paul’s.
