In May 2014 I had a chance to participate in Google Agency Day for Central and Eastern Europe Agencies that was held in Budapest, Hungary. This happened some time ago, but I wanted to reconstruct my memories and summarize impressions and giveaways.
Day 1. Welcome to Budapest
Having arrived to Budapest with digital marketing specialists from all over the Baltic States the day before the event, we had an evening for socializing and exploring places near our hotel.
Day 2. Inside Google Ground
Google CEE Agency Day was held in Google Ground – large Google training center, with various in- and outdoor areas, looking like a small village surrounded by modern and historical buildings.
One of the first presenters, after opening speeches, was Marcus Orlovsky – charismatic, inspirational and witty TEDx speaker. I won’t try to retell all his quotes and thoughts on education, our mindsets and experiences, but rather advise you to see one of his lectures on YouTube.
Next topic was about HR – Zsolt Feher described the necessary qualities for different types of employees, how to identify them in the recruiting process and motivate employees later on. Quoting: “It’s not your IQ, nor the school you have attended, but competencies that matter”.
After there was one more topic, but as I have no notes about it (sorry), let’s skip to panel discussion led by Goetz Trillhaas, Google CEE New Markets Country Manager. He interviewed three agency leaders on a variety of topics from pricing, to client relationships and management. It was really interesting to gain insights from different countries and markets and hear opinions on common issues.
For the second part of the event program was divided into 2 streams – it was possible to go broad and participate in more general sessions on business growth, or go deep into practical topics.
Second stream topics were too persuasive to miss and, so, without a doubt, I have chosen to go deep. Sessions started with RTB (trending topic now) by Piotr Kowalski and after Illes Vadasz spoke a lot about remarketing, cookies and segmentation. Presentation slides were really full with cookies. :) Promised myself to do spend more time on audience creation, segmenting and remarketing campaign testing.
Next two sessions were on Campaign Analysis and Google Tag Manager, led by Piotr Rudnicki from Google and local Google Partner agency representatives with their cases. During the data analytics part, the focus was on getting actionable insights and being analytics ninjas, not squirrels, that do mostly data production instead of analysis (although squirrels are much cuter).
From Tamas Geiger‘s practical GTM session (he is the creator of the DuracellTomi’s Google Tag Manager WordPress plugin) I’ve learned 2 small, but practical things – naming convention (great help in managing large accounts) and using a Constant String macro for storing tracking ID number. Was always upset of having to add GA ID multiple times and macros solve this problem completely. (And with Lookup Table you can have even more fun.)
Day 3. Exploring Budapest
There was time before the flight back, so our Baltic delegation walked through some of the famous sightseeing places of Budapest.
Acknowledgements
First of all, would like to thank Latvian Google team for this opportunity and support.
Second, would like to thank our organizing team. We could forget about all the possible worries of being in the foreign country, thank you for that.
It was a pleasure and great life experience to spend these days among such open, friendly and smart people.
Google is great in organizing positive, insightful and inspiring events and this wasn’t an exception.