Google Above & Beyond

As one of Google’s key advertisers, I was invited to go to Google’s Above & Beyond event at their European headquarters in Dublin (Ireland). The event was all about getting the most out of your Adwords campaigns and seeing a glimpse of Google’s future as well as some issues that are currently in the news.

The day was built up out of three sessions; The first one, was an extensive keynote speech, where both the Director of the Dublin Headquarters “John Herlihy” and the President of EMEA “Nikesh Arora” (Europe, Middle East & Africa) were prepared to answer your questions. Right at the end of our session Head of communications; “Rachel Whetstone” picked up and addressed some privacy related issues that were currently dealing with; and the more she got into it, the more overcome I came by the feeling and idea that Google has such a big responsibility to both their users and companies they work with. Take for example their new iGoogle, a personalized homepage at Google that stores your every search. With all the rules and regulations they have now narrowed the searches down to an ip address. So imagine both a biologist and a footballplayer search for the same term “dolphins”, as their history has build op quite some search history they will both get to see different results. Where the biologist would get to see more results towards marine dolphins the football player is likely to get results from the Miami Dolphin’s Football Team.

After a short break, where the most delicious snacks were up for grabs we got a session about the advertising on YouTube, Video advertising and Google Gadgets. Even though we are not quite ready to start advertising in these formats, I have gotten some great ideas and we’ll be starting to advertise with this in the very near future. Something I will keep you guys posted about.

Next item; Lunch! As I walked out of the room, my Adwords representatives picked my up and took me to the Google Restaurant. And Boyyy, was it a restaurant ! From Indian Food to Chinese to Fried Chicken, to Fish. They simply had almost everything. I filled up my stomach real good and met some other big advertisers. As a lot of people went out for a smoke, me and my Adwords Account managers went upstairs to for a nice cup of Cappuccino from their new coffee machine, we sparred around with some ideas and it was a nice opportunity to get to know the people you work with so close a little bit better.

My next session was a breakout session about Google Base and Google Checkout. For those of you who are working with real stock products, checkout Google Base. It’s definitely interesting if you own your own webshop. The Google Base Specialist recommended everybody to fill in all the variables of the bulk sheet to gain maximum traffic from the Google Base. Personally I was more interested in the Checkout product, because I believe it would be a great addition to Paypal for this site and for some of our clients. Unfortunately we cannot use it for this site yet, because currently Checkout doesn’t offer monthly billing or any recurring billing for that matter. But it won’t be too long before that’ll be added to the product.

After the breakout session I was supposed to attend a session about Webmaster Tools, but I got held up at the Google Apps demo stand. This is an awesome product! For both small and enterprise organizations. I’m a big fan of Microsoft Outlook and keep spamming my employees with task requests, reminders and meeting invites. But Google Apps has become a great alternative for Exchange and Outlook. It’s totally free and you’ll get a Calendar, Gmail account, Task manager and a web-based version of both Excel and Word. I was impressed.

My last agenda item before heading off to the Google dinner and party was an official meeting with my account managers. We went over some issues such as the coming Quality Score updates and how to prepare for that. But also talked about future planning for my accounts and what we could do to gain more traffic. But we would get into more detail on that the next day. My main guys gave me a brief tour of the Google Office and I had to do a short interview of what I like about and Adwords and how big my ROI’s were. With 3 minutes of preparing, a big bright light in my face that interview came down on a lot of “uehhh” I’m looking forward to seeing what came out of that material, but it was a lot of fun to do.

The evening was planned out very well, we first had an amazing dinner with everybody, where we got thanked for our business and continuous support, which to be honest fell kinda good. Over the years it felt for most of the time like Google was always playing police officer and always cut down the campaigns that were working best for you. And even though some of you will say it’s just a speech, which it is. I could tell he really meant it. During the evening, entertainment was served, from very funny movies on YouTube and some background info on Google products to women that were climbing to curtains lol. Good fun.

Afterwords the whole crowd moved to the Westin Dublin Hotel, were in the lower floor was Dublin’s best and most famous cocktail bar. This was just a huge networking event, and you could really see that there’s big diversity in the people that are advertising on Adwords. And I still think that there are so many untouched niches. The typical Irish, Guiness beers tasted very good and it got pretty late before I went back to my hotel room. Respect to the Googlers for partying with us till so late, even though they had to be in the office again at 08.30.

When I got back to the hotel room, there was a surprise from Google waiting for me. (No not that kind of a surprise) They had left me an RC chopper with Google on it. Very cool! I’m still a kid and probably will be for the next couple of decennia so I loved the present. I took it home with me to the office, and it’s now our favorit stress reliever. One of my guys like it so much, that he’d even bought one for himself, so we could compete.

After a quick last meeting at the Google office I flew back to Amsterdam with a lot of new ideas on how to improve my pages and areas to explore. This has definitely been one of the most interesting events of the year and besides that it was just very cool to see the office from inside and more importantly to meet the people that I talk with every day.

Thanks Google, for an amazing few days in Dublin !