Purna Virji will be speaking on Voice Search at the Engage Conference, which will take place March 9, 2017 in Portland. For more information, or to purchase tickets, please click here.
1) Please give us your background and let us know what you do for a living.
I’m the Senior PPC Training Manager at Microsoft and my job involves me traveling around to world to get to chat all things search with our clients either at events or 1:1 meetings.
Prior to getting into search over a dozen years ago I was a journalist. I produced a talk show on the local PBS affiliate in Philadelphia and loved every minute of it. Sadly, I had to cross over to the dark side which was traditional PR since the dark side has better hours and it pays better. Serendipitously I discovered search marketing and the rest as they say is history.
I still consider myself a journalist at heart and love that my job now let’s me still tap into those journalism traits of research and storytelling and it allows me to express my inner tech nerd.
2) Many will say that Bing is just playing “follow the leader” in evolving Bing Ads…and Bing isn’t doing any unique innovating. How would you respond to that?
My response would be I can absolutely understand why people may have that impression.
For the longest time our goal has been to earn market share and encourage advertisers to run campaigns on Bing Ads. To get people to export their campaigns to Bing Ads, we had to make it as easy as possible. This meant having parity with the market leader.
Think about it, would you have wanted to get on a new publisher if you had to learn an entire new system?
Even just a couple of years ago most advertisers could get away with just being on Google AdWords. We developed a lot of parity features which helped our adoption rates. Today, I’m incredibly proud of our current 32% market share in the U.S. and our global growth.
Especially over the past year we’ve developed new features or put our own spin on parity features that make it easier for our customers to better engage their audiences. For example, we provide transparency into our search partner performance, this means that advertisers can not only set up search partner only campaigns, but they can monitor performance and remove poor performers. So stay tuned, Bing Ads is just going to keep delighting you all.
3) How does the rise of voice search impact how a person should setup their PPC Campaign?
To get the full answer to this, I’d recommend you come to my Engage session where I’ll map out a step-by-step approach to getting started with voice search for PPC.
I’ll map out things like how people can identify queries that could be voice search generated, how should they think about keywords and creative and how much time one should invest.
The good news: it’s still very actionable even though it’s not monetized yet. Come to my session and get all the details!
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.