Google Engage SEM event Liverpool

We popped in to Liverpool yesterday and what a beautiful day to visit Liverpool. The sun bouncing off the cathedral was amazing.

It was a spot on meeting but I’m sure the speakers did not like me bombarding them with questions regarding the Keyword relativity score for AdWords. The night before I had read a leaked article on how this score was weighted and I was full of questions. Predictably they were tightlipped about everything but it was an interesting talk non the less. Our new Marketing manager Nick Morgan was graceful in the way he hid his embarrassment at my mass of questions to a very polite and patient speaker.

The two key things that were on the agenda were Engage and AdWords Express (AWX). I will talk about AWX in another post but Engage was very interesting indeed. Engage is a platform that Google are now using to bridge the gap between smaller design, digital and SEO/SEM agencies and SME clients. They are providing online training and project management support for agencies in the hope that the more we know the more we can sell (my words not theirs).

It’s a good idea and one I feel is long overdue. Any agency that has tried to actually talk to Google will have found it difficult. As we begin to expand our search marketing team over the next 12 months this is a comforting move for me. We have a number of clients that have managed PPC accounts by ahoy, used alongside SEO and other forms of marketing like email marketing it can be really effective. Hopefully if its as good as it promises the extra help our SEM team gets will something agencies can pass on to their clients.