Four weeks after that I’ll be headed to Ohio for the much smaller, but far more intimate Small Business Marketing Unleashed. Here I will be speaking in two sessions, the first on website architecture and the second will be an SEO workshop.

With that in mind, I wanted to pose a few questions: What value do you get out of going to these big conferences? Are they any better or worse than smaller, more intimate conferences? Which do you prefer, and what do you come home with of value (other than quality schwag)?

Please opine.

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It also proved to me that Canadian marketers are not just “something like 18 months behind the US,” but more like a range anywhere from one year to five years behind. That’s a bit eerie for me to observe because we are *so* ready at my agency to help you get to the next level and the one after that… it’s just tough to sit and listen to “should we or shouldn’t we” hand-wringing at this stage. You should.

I don’t mind the narrative, actually – it’s eye-opening. It is, however, not fair that search people should have to prove it’s real anymore – not even that we should have to cite *how* real – in $billions.

Aforesaid attendee had some interesting takes on the special needs of her company, but these were stories I’d heard many times before and worked with routinely many times before. What really got me was the sort-of-premise for the slow adoption: “well, I read a story in Business Week about horrible click fraud” and the whole thing

Sometimes, you have to come to the table with at least the barest of facts. Buoyed as always by monster earnings, Google is today a $130 billion company. It’s on the way to earning $1 billion of *profit* per quarter. It rung up $2.69 billion in revenues in a single quarter… and not the fourth Q either, but Q3. It’s all there in words, numbers, and pictures. Nearly all of that revenue came from clicks. They can’t all be fake, now can they? Let’s not belabor the obvious! It’s time to get cracking, Softimage! Run that campaign!

Thanks to everyone who candidly shared their views, including new members of the Yahoo Search Marketing Canada team, and Melissa from Future Now (and all the rest). I hope you’ll all follow up by email – as I did promise you all a copy of my book (of course Future Now has it already, and I have a copy of theirs .

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Andrew Goodman is Principal of Page Zero Media, a marketing consultancy which focuses on maximizing clients’ paid search marketing campaigns.

In 1999 Andrew co-founded Traffick.com, an acclaimed “guide to portals” which foresaw the rise of trends such as paid search and semantic analysis.