Google Think Finance 2015, Dublin, Ireland #gfinance

Posted By Jonathan Jones on Oct 7, 2015 in Laptops | 0 comments

I was lucky enough to be invited to Google’s Think Finance Conference in Dublin, on Wednesday and Thursday on the 16th and 17th of September. The speakers were great and were more importantly thought provoking and really did engage with the audience. It also helped that most of them were quite funny, too and are known industry experts.

It all started off with with a choir singing and then Anita O’ Flynn, Sales Manager – Google introduced everyone to what was on the agenda and how exactly everything would work. Then Emmanuel Dolle, Head of LCS – Google France gave a funny presentation himself. He was also in the choir, though it was unclear what exactly what he was doing which made the situation quite funny. You can see this in the picture below (credit: Twitter):

Connect: Owning The Moment

Hanne Tuomisto-inch – Industry Head – Google

Google have talked a lot on the Think Finance website about making the most out of micro-moments using display and have an entire section dedicated to micro-moments.

It was all about brands identifying the moments that may not exactly drive commercial intent, but may drive more of a branding argument. If user x visits an informational page, then the next time that user x does a search he may pick your brand because of the previous association he has had with getting the valuable information from your site. It becomes all the more important because of a lot more people are now using their smartphones to search, which brings on the point that 91% of smartphone users will use their mobile to inform their decision when purchasing a product. It’s new battleground for brands, the — want-to-know moments, want-to-go moments, want-to-do moments, and want-to-buy moments. It looked at a lot of this from a Paid Media perspective, and I can imagine this was a push from Google to get finance companies to start bidding in PPC for informational terms – not exactly high ROI terms or easy-to-prove return on investment keywords/phrases. In organic search, you can argue that this is already something that we do. We cover the moments that simply won’t give us conversions, but gives our users the information they need to make a purchase, for example. The only thing I’d say is that they could have mentioned something about collaborating with content teams or your SEO team to create these pages. There was one example of a moment in Ireland about providing information on the National Car Test, a mandatory car test procedure, and then being able to be front of mind when selling car insurance for example because you provided the association in step 1. It’s all very interesting, and it would be great if there was a simple way of working out if (a) leads to (b) and then to (c) and so forth.

Finance at the End of Old Norms

Dr. Constantin Gurdgiev

The first presentation was by Dr. Constantin Gurdgiev an economist at Trinity College, Dublin.

Surviving the Hype Cycle