Day 2 (the final day) of SMX Advanced has come and gone and just like the first day, I have some thoughts and pictures to share with you all.

The first session out of the gate was the "Is Bid Management Dead" debate which was held in a very interesting format. Basically there were 2 sides, one for bid management and one not, and each had to pitch their case to the audience. Each side also had chance to make a rebuttal argument on what the other side had mentioned. For me personally, I went into the session with the opinion that bid management was dead. I ended up leaving with that same idea. Pay Per Click is much, much, MUCH, more than adjusting bids and so forth. With quality score and the mystic black box taken into consideration, managing paid campaigns is no longer a process any more... it's an art form. And therefore the days of bid management are over.

My thinking was later validated in the next session, "Pump Up Your Paid Search". This was a pretty decent run-down on "advanced" PPC management, and included talks of day-parting, bidding on trademark terms, and a break-down on each of the engine's Keyword Insertion tools (KWI). I have a few take-a-ways from it, but instead of just throwing them down in this post I will address them in a couple of future posts... they do merit their own posts.

Lunch, again, was tremendous. If you didn't read my day 1 notes, we were served a superb hot plate buffet-style lunch. I only make a big deal about this because the past conferences I've attended distributed boxed lunches... crappy ones at that.

My last two sessions, "Better Ways" and "Give It Up" were both organic related sessions and featured all-star line-ups of our industry's best.

"Better Ways" was a non-slideshow session that featured 75 minutes of Q&A. A couple of take-a-ways included:

Use Microsoft's adLabs as a much-better keyword research alternative.

Ideal linking partners are those that can offer links on pages with a bunch of quality links pointing to them. For instance, its best to have a link coming from a page that has 1,000 or so links pointing to it as opposed to a link from that person's link page... which ultimately would have no-one pointing to it.

The "Give It Up" session, as described in the conference guide, is a session where a panel of noted SEOs would all share some of their favorite and largely overlooked SEO tips. That's exactly what it was. Even Google's Quality Control Engineer Matt Cutts stood up and shared an interesting story that highlighted one spammy way to get a large amount of inbound links. It was freakin' awesome! Unfortunately, I and the others in the audience took a vow of silence and promised that we would not publish any of these goodies... and I for one plan to stick to that promise. Sorry.

And that's that. I'm planning on doing a small overview of the conference a little later in the week (with my final thoughts on the show), but for now I'm going to relax and enjoy the rest of my trip.