John Gagnon will be speaking on the “Big Ideas for Big (and Little) Data – How to Creatively Crunch Numbers to Maximize Your Search, Social, and PR Campaigns” panel at SearchFest 2014 which will take place on February 28th, 2014 in Portland, Oregon. For more information and to purchase tickets, please click here.
1) Please give us your background and tell us what you do for a living.
I’m the Bing Ads Evangelist, which basically means I am a huge search nerd. I focus on paid search strategies – finding the great ones and making sure more folks know about them. At the end of the day, making smarter marketing decisions makes everyone happier.
2) I’ve become an advanced PPC Marketer with “hack-level” Excel skills. What am I missing by not being an Excel Guru?
A lot. It boils down to missed insights and wasted time. The pipeline of PPC data is growing. And Excel has just come out with a fantastic new suite of tools called Power BI to help manage all that data. Power Pivot helps Excel handle up to nearly 2 billion (with a “b”) rows of data. And jaw-dropping visualizations from Power Map are driving new insights. Insights can get lost in millions of rows of data, but make the data visual and the human eye can recognize the patterns. And no matter how “advanced” you are, I’ve found everyone can pick up a few shortcuts to save time every time they open Excel.
3)Why did Bing Ads elect to tie their toolset to Excel (as opposed to something stand-alone)?
Bing Ads data isn’t tied just to Excel. Reporting gives you options to get data in the standard formats like .csv to use in your favorite analysis program. It just turns out, advertisers use Excel – a lot. And cool tools like Bing Ads Intelligence are more powerful when you can analyze data using the charts and formulas in Excel.
Todd Mintz knows PPC…knows Social Media…knows SEO…knows Blogging…knows Domaining…and knows them all real well. He runs growth marketing for )and is also a Director & Founding Member of SEMpdx: Portland, Oregon’s Search Engine Marketing Association, and he can be found here on Twitter and Facebook.