Shawn, Keith, Toni, and I had the pleasure of attending SES San Jose last week. On Monday I presented on the “Advanced Paid Search Techniques” panel again. I got the most questions about a very recent finding that we’ve made. It seems that Google geo-targeting in Texas is not as accurate as it is in other states. We found that targeting in Houston is particularly amiss; at least it was last month.

As usual, I got to attend just a couple of sessions.

The first one was “Search Marketers on Click Fraud.” It was a must-attend session for me because it featured my friend and British PPC master Jon Myers of Latitude Group, as well as Jessie Stricchiola of Alchemist Media, who was on my paid search panel at SES NYC. I would say the overall tone of the session was disappointment with search engines’ efforts and disbelief of their numbers. There seems to be a huge gulf between what the engines (particularly Google) claim is the scope of the problem and what third parties are measuring. There also is a philosophical gulf between those who believe click fraud should be baked into bid prices (Google, from past comments) and those who think that publishers/networks should deal with it more aggressively on the front-end.

The second session I attended was “Meet the Search Ad Networks.” This is just a forum for Microsoft, Google, Yahoo, AOL and Ask to present their view of the search world. What did each say? Microsoft is still giving the “we know we’re not there yet, but we’re working on it” line. Ask thinks it is actually the #3 search engine by some measure and that they just need to grow the number of searches per user to gain significant share. AOL is excited about the 50 advertisers who can bid on its white-label version of AdWords. As to Google & Yahoo, well, nothing you probably haven’t heard before.

That was it for me and the presentations. The highlight for me is always meeting smart and interesting folks at the conference. I enjoyed conversations with Kevin & Mark, Emilio, Heather & Hannes, Patrick , Brad, Rebecca, Troy, Anne (in the booth next door), Derek, Matt (on my panel), our good friend Chuck, our old friend Ani & my new friend Tamar. And, as always it was great to catch up again with Brent, Neal, Chris, Todd, David and the rest of the conference regulars.

Next up for us is the 5^th Annual Financial Services Marketing Symposium in Phoenix, AZ and then Pubcon. Hope to see you there!