Sven has been responsible for the Google Shopping channel and the most important product search engines at OTTO since 2012. In recent years he and his team have liberated this channel from a niche existence and developed it into one of the top online marketing channels for otto.de. He gained his first online marketing experience with the performance marketing agency eprofessional. For almost 10 years, Sven has focused on the potential of automated product data marketing and its advantages over keyword-based search.

Barry Adams is an award-winning SEO consultant specialising in technical SEO for news publishers and ecommerce websites. He's been active in SEO since 1998, and has worked with a wide range of clients from micro-businesses to the world's largest media companies. Barry enjoys sharing his knowledge and experience with the industry; he regularly speaks at digital conferences around the world, provides guest lectures for universities, and is co-chief editor at popular European marketing blog State of Digital.

As SEO Product Owner for Arrow Electronics, Jamie Alberico works side by side with developers to engineer holistic SEO strategies, scalable infrastructures, and smart system governance. She has worked the last 10 years refining her focus to specialize in SEO for enterprise ecommerce and JavaScript frameworks.  When not working, she likes horror movies, graphic novels, and Dungeons & Dragons.

After a rather unsuccessful career as a professional musician, Tom began building websites while still studying in the 90s (computer science, English and German). Early in his career, Tom led the development of search engines including Lycos, HotBot and Fireball. After the rollout of the European search engine Seekport, he worked for Ask.com as Director International Search Products before becoming Director of Search at uniquedigital in Hamburg. From 2011 to 2016, Tom worked at Google, heading the sales efforts for Enterprise Analytics products in DACH and CEE. From 2017 to 2018, he was the Director Data and Analytics at Interone and headed bbdo’s Data Academy. Today, he is Chief Digital Transformation Officer at Euler Hermes.
Tom is also author of the first German book on Web 2.0, and has also published on SEO, professional blogging and mobile web. He is a certified project manager (PMP) of the Project Management Institute and a lecturer at HAW Hamburg.

Tom conceptualised DistilledODN, the first SEO split-testing platform available publicly, and leads team that are building it. He believes the platform could bring a new era of data-driven SEO. He does lot of research around technology trends and the future of search, and work with Distilled's consulting team to try and forecast the impact those trends will have on SEO and Digital Marketing.

Andy Atkins-Krüger is the CEO of WebCertain Group, an international web marketing agency which brings together native speakers from countries around the world to provide a centralized hub for clients. It is one of the only agencies to focus solely on international projects and covers over 44 languages in-house.

Andy contributes regularly to publications and blogs on international search. He writes regular of blog.webcertain.com. He also speaks regularly at conferences around the world including SMX, SES, Eye for Travel, Click Asia Summit and PubCon. In addition,Andy is the Chair of the International Search Summit.

Matt has been working in Search for well over a decade, and is the co-founder of Aira - a UK based digital marketing agency. With a strong understanding of the more technical side of things - focusing on SEO, PPC and Analytics - he loves nothing more than hacking some code together (which usually involves some copy/paste from Stack Overflow), pulling data from an API, or using Tagman to do something that his family would never understand.

Sascha was self-employed with a small SEO Agency in Dortmund. 2017 he started working as Inhouse-SEO for UNIQ, better known as Urlaubsguru. Now he is Team Lead at UNIQ and responsible for the whole SEO-team.

Since 2009 in online marketing, among others as SEO team leader in agencies, senior at Chefkoch.de and currently proud team member at gofeminin.de. Favourite topics: schema.org and multilingual content markup on complex websites with exotic languages. She has more interests than the week has hours, but her particular passion is language in all its facets. And food!

While others wanted to become professional footballers, Julian has always been fascinated by online marketing. Although he still studied history and archaeology, he started blogging on www.Seokratie.de in 2007 and turned his passion into his profession. Over time, the blog became an online marketing agency. Today, the Munich-based agency employs around 20 people in the fields of SEO, SEA, content marketing, social media and usability.

Christian Ebernickel is a freelance digital analytics consultant and advises companies in various industries on web analytics. He focuses on the conception and implementation of extensive tracking setups with Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager, audits and troubleshootings. He was awarded the Analytics Award in 2017 for his solution for evaluating personas with Google Analytics.

Florian Eckert has been a digital manager at McDonald's Germany for almost ten years and is responsible for the company's websites. In this position he is also responsible for the optimization of the approx. 1,500 Google My Business entries of the system gastronome. He previously held various positions at the Scout24 Group, including Conversion Optimization at the LoveScout24 dating platform.

Michaela Engelshowe was one of the first German women to upload videos for marketing purposes to Youtube in 2008. As one of the few agencies in the industry, Netz WG specializes in enabling brands to grow both organically and sustainably with sophisticated strategies. Netz WG achieves this through good knowledge of how the Youtube algorithm works and a view on the content from a Youtube viewer's perspective. 

Sebastian Erlhofer is an avid Online-Marketeer with special interest in SEO. He founded the mindshape GmbH in 2002. Sitting in nice cologne, he and his 30 team members are consulting diverse clients and optimizing their online businesses and websites. Sebastian is also known as author of the german standard book "Suchmaschinen-Optimierung" in the 8th edition with over 900 pages.

Kristoffer Ewald is an internationally recognized digital marketing and strategy director with 18+ years of experiences. His career have included a web agency called Silvertag in the happy days of 1998 internet, NXT@Copenhagen Institute for Future Studies to co-incubating THNK, an innovation consultancy that sold to Saatchi & Saatchi in 2003. Later he co-founded The Milk, a first mover on digital marketing strategies focused on usability, behavioural economics, BigData and Analytics, later acquired by Guava a subsidiary of Netbooster Group. Kristoffer now leads the Data Intelligence & Analytics Strategy efforts in Netbooster that aim at delivering Data Intelligence, Analytics and Marketing Performance consulting strategies to global clients.

Also, Kristoffer have been active in the Digital Analytics Association since it’s early days, and sits in the Research Comittee still. Currently Kristoffer is a co-founding member of the board at Assoc. of Danish Digital Agencies (ADDA). Kristoffer is a very popular and well received international speaker with well over 150 talks on his path. He lives with his wife and two young kids in wonderful Copenhagen. When he’s not on the road he rides his bike to work and dreams of the days when there was still enough free time to go adventure racing.

Dennis Fäckeler is Head of Growth & Performance Marketing at Homelike, the digital booking platform for furnished temporary apartments. Born in the Sauerland region of Germany, Fäckeler studied industrial engineering and marketing management, helped set up various eCommerce projects and ultimately specialized in performance and growth marketing.

Pascal is managing partner of cogito ergo GmbH & Co. KG. He is publisher and author of q48.de, a German online marketing and e-business blog for online executives eager to discuss. 

His focus is primarily on online business models and their optimization, so he helps various companies and well-known brands to improve their ROI within the entire Internet activities. He also works as a consultant for various companies, helping them to build in-house e-commerce expertise. As an investor he supports start-ups with innovative business models in the area of online and media.

Prior to his step into self-employment with cogito ergo, he spent three years at FriendScout24 as Head of Business Development, responsible for the entire online marketing area at FiendScout24. Previously, he was responsible for business development in the Consumer Generated Media and User Tracking divisions at FOCUS Digital AG (now TOMORROW FOCUS AG), where he held the position of Chief Executive Officer.

Pascal studied computer science and economics at the Technical University of Munich, then obtained a BAW diploma in communications and finally received a bac. Phil. from the The Munich School of Philosophy.

Jens Fauldrath is founder and managing director of get:traction GmbH. He supports his clients in the development, implementation and realisation of their SEO strategy. Prior to that, he managed takevalue Consulting GmbH from 2012-2016. From 2008 to 2012 he also built up and led the SEO team of Deutsche Telekom AG P&I. Jens is a lecturer in search engine marketing at Darmstadt University of Applied Sciences and a member of the SEO expert advisory board and the executive board of the BVDW's Search focus group. He also runs the German podcast network for online marketing podcasts, www.termfrequenz.de There he moderates the podcast SEO House on current topics in strategic SEO.

Stefan Fischerländer is a renowned German search consultant, having more than 15 years experience in online marketing. He writes for several journals and gives conference talks about technical SEO aspects. As a co-founder of the digital consultant agency Gipfelstolz he supports leading companies in Germany with his knowledge.

Rand dropped out of the University of Washington in 2000 to work full-time at his mother’s small business marketing firm as a web designer. In 2004, he created the SEOmoz blog, which, over the next decade, became the world’s most popular community and content resource for search marketers. In 2007, Rand became CEO of SEOmoz, Inc (now called Moz), the software company he co-founded with his mom based on the blog’s success. That same year, he proposed to his longtime girlfriend, Geraldine DeRuiter, with a TV commercial that received widespread publicity (and, later, an awkward appearance on the Oprah Winfrey show). The two married in 2008 in a move Rand consistently refers to as the best, luckiest one of his life.
Over 7 years as CEO, Rand grew Moz from 7 employees to 134, revenues from $800K to $29.3mm, and traffic from 1 to 30mm annual visitors. He raised two rounds of funding ($1.1mm in 2007 and $18.1mm in 2012), led three acquisitions, and, in 2013, re-branded the company from SEOmoz to Moz, shifting focus from exclusively SEO tools to broader web marketing software. Rand stepped down as CEO in February of 2014 during a rough bout with depression and left the company 4 years later. He remains chairman of Moz’s board.
Rand is also the co-founder of Inbound.org, a site to dedicated to sharing articles about marketing from across the web, alongside Dharmesh Shah. The site was sold (for no profit) to Hubspot in 2014.
Rand may be best known for his popular blogs and regular Whiteboard Friday series, watched by tens of thousands of marketers each week. Rand is also a frequent keynote speaker at marketing conferences around the world, averaging ~100 days on the road each year and 30-40 speaking appearances. He has, much to his own surprise, amassed a large following on Twitter, Pocket, Facebook, and Slideshare.
In 2018, Rand founded SparkToro (an under-development software company focused on audience and influencer intelligence) and published, with Penguin/Random House, Lost and Founder: A Painfully Honest Field Guide to the Startup World.
Rand previously co-contributed to two books: Art of SEO, and Inbound Marketing & SEO. He’s been profiled in the Seattle Times, featured in Puget Sound Business Journal’s 40 Under 40, named to BusinessWeek’s 30 Under 30, written about in Newsweek, The Next Web, the Inc 500 (to which Moz was named 5 years in a row), and hundreds of other publications. He is, however, most proud of his prominent appearances in Geraldine’s first book, All Over the Place.

Tobias Fox is a passionate online marketer, speaker and presenter. His lecture style is energetic, impulsive and humorous. With his lectures, he always has the ambition to convey practical tips and valuable food for thought. He feels at home in the areas of SEO, Adwords, Google Analytics and Content Marketing. Tobias Fox is managing director of the Internet agency VERDURE media team GmbH and he's a welcome guest at colleges and universities as an assistant lecturer for online marketing. In his spare time Tobias interviews startups, founders and entrepreneurs for VENTURETV. In its private Blog tobias-fox.de he publishes videos and tips around the topic SEO.

Trutz Fries is founder and managing director of the Amazon agency REVOIC. In this context, he advises major sellers and vendors in both strategic and operational areas. One focus is on advising vendors who want to switch to the seller model.  He has also founded the Amazon Business Intelligence tool AMALYTIX.COM. With the help of AMALYTIX, vendors and sellers can monitor their activities on Amazon. Last but not least, Trutz Fries is the author of the book "Amazon Marketplace".

Brad Geddes is a co-founder of AdAlysis, an ad testing & recommendation platform. Brad is the author of Advanced Google AdWords, the most advanced book ever written about Google's advertising program.

Brad has worked in PPC since 1998, and over those years he was worked with companies who manage tens of thousands of small PPC accounts and other companies who spend millions on marketing each month. His experience ranges from owning his own agency, to managing a boutique agency, to overseeing programs that were official resellers of Google and Microsoft. Some brands he has worked with include: Amazon, Yahoo, Google, YellowPages.com, Encyclopedia Britannica, and Salesforce.

One of his trademarks has been demystifying the complicated aspects of SEM. Not one to hold secrets, Brad prefers to educate his readers on the various aspects of crafting successful marketing campaigns to ensure the success for all parties involved.

Karl is number three on the list of most influential conversion experts in the world. He’s the G in AGConsult, a Belgium-based usability and conversion optimization company. He’s been optimizing websites since 2001. Always based on user research & facts, because he’s tired of all the opinions and gut feelings in the web business. The last few years he’s been obsessed with AB-testing. Mainly because it allows him to see the impact of changes he proposes based on research. But AB-testing also made Karl humble again. Because he noticed that best practices don’t always work. And that his great ideas and solutions sometimes utterly fail. Karl teaches at several university colleges in Belgium and speaks at conferences all over the world. He’s also known as the ‘conversion comedian’. He works for clients such as Suzuki, Thomas Cook, Tui, Shell and Daikin.

As founder and owner of Büro für gute Websites and TechnicalSEO.de, André Goldmann is an expert in online-marketing, UX/UI- and SEO with 20 years of industry experience. He developed and marketed his first website at the age of 14. Among other things, he worked for Unister GmbH and worked for several web and advertising agencies as an in-house SEO and consultant. From 2012 to 2017 he was CTO and COO of 121WATT GmbH.

André mainly supports his clients with SEO audits, Google Analytics and Conversion Rate audits as well as UX and Landingpage audits to optimize their new and existing websites. He is also a mentor for online marketers and SEOs of mid-sized companies.
As a lecturer at Steinbeis University, he has held more than 80 seminars on website usability and experience, online marketing, advanced SEO and technical SEO as part of the Certified Digital Marketing Manager (SHB) training program.

Bartosz Góralewicz is the CEO at Onely, an SEO agency that specializes in preventing and curing technical SEO issues for businesses of all sizes, including renowned international corporations. He is passionate about sharing his expertise and frequently publishes thorough case studies. In his off time, he enjoys spending time with his wife and two young baby girls.

Oliver Greifenstein has 8 years of experience with Google Ads accounts of all shapes and sizes. He’s worked with international clients in various industries and has a knack for finding methods that make large sized accounts more lean and scalable. Former online marketing & PPC strategist at smec (based in Austria), he is currently Head of Operations.

Bastian Grimm is the Director of Organic Search at Peak Ace and a renowned expert in large-scale, international SEO – managing sites of almost any size in highly competitive industries. 

Always eager to expand his knowledge, with more than 15 years’ experience in online marketing, technical and global SEO, Bastian currently oversees Peak Ace’s search engine optimisation as well as content marketing initiatives. 

Striving for efficiency is one of Bastian Grimm’s key guiding principles. It has shaped his entire career. His belief that understanding a target market means not only getting to grips with the language, but also the culture, has held him in good stead. Bastian leads a thriving team of expert native speakers, able to serve clients in 20+ languages, and the results speak for themselves.

A full-service performance marketing agency with a focus on “all things search,” Peak Ace has a flair for over-achieving. Having been named a FOCUS growth champion for multiple years in a row, as well as scooping up trophies at both the European Search and Drum Search Awards, Bastian is proud to lead such an innovative, ever-expanding company. His secret? Dynamic, decisive processes, a phenomenal team and going to bed with inbox zero.

Christopher Gutknecht is Head of Online Marketing at the Munich eCommerce agency norisk GmbH. He describes himself as a "SEA child" - his heart has been in this area since 2008. After a stopover at intelliAd, he and his team have been supporting shop customers in the area of performance marketing since 2013 and are passionate about developing new tools and innovations in the area of SEA automation so that team and customers can concentrate more on the actual mental work.

Timon Hartung has been active in online marketing and AdTech for over 10 years. He has his origins as a technology specialist in SEO, where he is also known as a speaker at international conferences and as a lecturer. But his expertise in performance marketing is also strong, especially in the areas of Facebook marketing, direct traffic and its tracking possibilities.  Both on the corporate side as well as on the entrepreneur side as a StartUp founder, Timon was able to gain extensive experience. All this supports him in his current core business as a consultant for online marketing strategies, where he advises clients ind Germany and internationally.

Robin Heintze is managing director of the online marketing specialist morefire. The 65-person international team of sympathetic specialists uses all relevant channels in online marketing to achieve sustainable growth for customers. The interdisciplinary teams deliver the strategy and the interlocking implementation of several channels from a single source. Customers include B2B and B2C companies from many different industries and countries. SEO, SEA, content marketing, social media, display, marketing automation and web analysis are used to win new customers for the customers. Current online marketing know how from the experts can be found on the agency blog more-fire.com/blog

Markus Hövener is founder and Head of SEO of Bloofusion (www.bloofusion.de), an online marketing agency specializing in SEO and SEA. As managing partner of Bloofusion Germany he is responsible for all activities in Germany, Austria and Switzerland. Markus Hövener is editor-in-chief of the magazine suchradar (www.suchradar.de), active SEO blogger (blog.bloofusion.de) and has his own podcast Search Camp (www.searchcamp.de). He is also the author of two books („International SEO“ und „SEO - Die neuen Regeln“) as well as many articles and studies and speaks at many online marketing conferences (SMX, SEO Day, SEO Campixx, SEOkomm, Search Conference, iico, ...).

Before joining Bloofusion, he developed some of the first search engines in Europe before focusing on search engine optimization in 2001 and founding Bloofusion in California in 2002.

Alexander Holl, born in 1964, is founder and managing director of 121WATT , which focuses on seminars on online marketing, SEO and Google AdWords in Munich, Hamburg and Berlin. More than 20 years Internet and 15 years search machine marketing & Web analysis coin the CV of the learned business economist. In this time Holl was among other things managing director kalaydo.de, in the European management of Yahoo! and in responsible positions with AltaVista and Cable & Wireless. Alexander Holl is a member of the SEO expert council of the BVDW and teaches online marketing and search engine optimization at Steinbeis University. Holl is also a Google Analytics consultant at the Google Partner Academy. 

Navah Hopkins is part of the Customer Success and Thought Leadership teams at WordStream. She began working in digital marketing in 2008, transitioning from SEO to Paid Search in 2012. Since that time she’s worked with SMBs and the agencies who serve them across the globe, helping them unlock the full potential of their budgets, as well as turn PPC into a scalable part of their organizations. When she’s not working with clients, she shares lessons learned through international conferences including SMX, PubCon, Search Marketing Summit, Google customer events, as well as local workshops. She was named one of the 2018 Top 25 Most Influential PPC marketers, and likes to pay it forward by mentoring future marketers at local universities.

When she’s not empowering customers or speaking, Navah loves gaming with her husband and playing with her rescue dog, HK-47 (star wars), and Ocicat siblings, Chinook and Kiowa. Connect with her on twitter @navahf and follow #ppcpuppy on Instagram for ppc tips from HK.

Gemma Houghton has been working in international search for 5 years and leads WebCertain's marketing team. She is responsible for managing WebCertain's online marketing activities around the world as well as organising and programming the International Search Summit, which runs across Europe and the US. She contributes regularly to the multilingual-search.com blog and writes for State of Search. She has spoken on international search on various webinars and at conferences. Gemma holds a Professional Diploma in Marketing from the Chartered Institute of Marketing and a BA Joint Honours Degree in French and German.

Kirsty Hulse is an SEO, content and PR expert with over a decade of experience defining search strategies for some of the world’s leading brands. As the Managing Director of successful SEO agency Manyminds, she has worked with household global brands such as Virgin Atlantic, Claire’s and IBM.  She has recently co-founded Outrageous Creative, an agency evangelising considered, creative marketing.
She’s a renowned speaker on marketing, innovation and leadership, and is the author of the #1 Amazon bestseller, ‘The Future is Freelance’.

Mark is chiefly responsible for creating WordStream’s data-driven industry research, analyzing data and spotting trends within over 22,000 AdWords, Bing Ads, and Facebook ad accounts. He regularly presents his research on trends in the PPC industry on webinars and at conferences around the globe, such as SMX, Social Media Week, and Pubcon. His work has also been featured on CNET, The Washington Post, MSNBC, BBC and CNN. Mark has been named one of the 15 most influential PPC Experts each year since 2016 by PPC Hero.

Désirée-Sina has been with the Cologne agency morefire GmbH since 2009. As Head of Paid Media she is responsible for everything to do with paid traffic. Testing new ideas and possibilities, developing strategies and taking campaigns to a new level is her great passion. Complicated structures, interlocking of measures and multi-stage campaigns? Désirée's heart beats faster. She and Robin Heintze have joined forces to set up the Cologne SEA Stammtisch so that the Rhineland in particular can better network and exchange information.

Fionn Kientzler is managing partner at Suxeedo, one of Germany's most established content marketing agencies, serving among others Fortune 500 and DAX corporations. As a lecturer at the University of Munich, he researches viral factors in content campaigns. He is a frequent speaker at content marketing conferences. 

An artist and a technologist, all rolled into one, Michael King recently founded boutique digital marketing agency, iPullRank. Mike consults with companies all over the world, including brands ranging from SAP, American Express, HSBC, SanDisk, General Mills, and FTD, to a laundry list of promising startups and small businesses.

Mike has held previous roles as Marketing Director, Developer, and tactical SEO at multi-national agencies such as Publicis Modem and Razorfish. Effortlessly leaning on his background as an independent hiphop musician, Mike King is a dynamic speaker who is called upon to contribute to conferences and blogs all over the world.

Since 2011 Philipp Klöckner focuses on mentorship for startups and search consultancy to share his experience in search marketing, comparison shopping und business intelligence. As an independent consultant and angel investor he's helping portfolio companies of Berlin's Rocket Internet AG, publishing houses and eCommerce giants worldwide. Before starting his consultancy business, Philipp has been working 6 years at Germany's market leading comparison search engine Idealo.de

Born in Heidelberg, she then lived in Thailand, Spain and the USA. After studying Intercultural Management at the CBS in Cologne, she moved to Munich. As a young professional, she discovered the world of startups - in addition to her job as Communications Manager for a Munich-based innovation consultancy and part-time engagements as a moderator, she trained at TAM as a certified business trainer. In 2017, she took the step into self-employment as a moderator at events and conferences, primarily with a focus on digital, tech and innovation. Her motto: I love to be a host! She also works as a communication and speaker trainer for individuals and companies. In 2018 she starts her own course STAGELOVERS with the topic "Feeling good on stage"!

When Natalie was in 4th grade, she created an idea that became a national commercial for Tide.  Having peaked on the creative side at such a young age, she decided to dedicate the rest of her advertising career to helping business leaders make better marketing decisions based on data and research.

And dedicated she has been. Her resume reads like a Fortune 500 wish list: PwC, IBM, CoreMetrics, Dell, Humana, and The Richards Group.  Her core competencies include everything from pricing and marketing mix modeling to decision science management and data science. But wait, there’s more: Natalie has also invented and patented multiple marketing optimization models, teaches Big Data at conferences, and hosts her own blog celebrating the confluence of mathematics and marketing.

Astrid Kramer has been active in online marketing with a focus on SEO since 2007. For more than 6 years she has been advising market-leading and wide-reaching portals, publishing sites and shops. She has also lectured at the Bertelsmann Academy, Hamburg Media School, Good School and AFS. Her academic background includes a master's degree in information science, social psychology and legal informatics and a postgraduate course in business management.

Karl Kratz has been developing holistic online marketing strategies for his readers and clients since 1996. The entrepreneur founded and developed several companies and many successful medium-sized brands. In 2009 Karl Kratz retired from the operative business and has been looking after his online marketing readership even more intensively ever since.

He specializes in potential development and conversion optimization through the use of deconstructivist strategies.

Yannick has been working for TLGG in Berlin since 2012. TLGG is a digital business agency that has been helping companies position themselves in the digital age since 2008. Yannick manages one of TLGG's seven business units and has helped brands such as Deutsche Bahn, Telekom and Airbnb communicate successfully in digital channels.

Patrick Lürwer is Senior Analyst at get:traction GmbH and Partner. His focus is on the implementation of ETL processes for the procurement of data using APIs, web scraping, etc.

Sam Marsden is an experienced SEO and digital marketer, working as SEO & Content Manager at DeepCrawl. Sam is a regular speaker on the SEO conference circuit and a columnist for Search Engine Journal and State of Digital. When he isn’t writing about technical SEO or experimenting with new Data Studio dashboards, Sam enjoys weekend runs to shake off a mean hangover and scouring the web for dank memes.

Joe Martinez is the Director of Client Strategy for Clix Marketing. His focus on marketing psychology and user experience helps his clients achieve record growths and lifetime customers. While he is hands-on in all aspects of PPC, his true passions lie in Display, Remarketing, and YouTube. He is a regular contributor to Search Engine Land, Marketing Land, and WordStream. He has also written for PPC Hero, SEMrush, Unbounce, Leadpages, Optmyzr, and AdStage. He has hosted webinars for SEMrush, Unbounce, Quora and Bing Ads. He regularly speaks at conferences such as SMX Advanced, SMX West, SMX East, HeroConf, Confluence Conference, Digital Olympus and more. Finally, he was named a Top 25 Influential PPC Expert by PPC Hero in 2017 and 2018.

Sarah Messmer is a digital marketing consultant at the international digital agency Dept. With her passion for digital media and trends and several years of experience in campaign management and digital marketing, she advises her clients in all digital matters. When Sarah is not realizing digital projects or taking care of clients' needs she is out there somewhere exploring the world with her backpack. 

Felix Meyer is Chief Operating Officer (COO) at Seokratie GmbH, a Munich-based online marketing agency. He is responsible for all services, like for instance SEO, SEA, Content Marketing and Social Media Marketing. His background and special field is in analytical and strategic search engine optimization.

Martin Mißfeldt studied free art and painting. Since the beginning of the 1990s, he has been exploring the question of the optimal mediation of content in digital media. Since 2002 he has been self-employed with his company Duplicon. Through his own picture websites he recognized the possibilities of search engine optimization for pictures in 2007. Since then he has written countless articles on the subject in tagSeoBlog, written an e-book about it and is considered an expert on image SEO. Mißfeldt runs numerous websites in the art and health sector, whose success is also based on his (optimized) images.

Johannes joined Google in 2007 and works as a Webmaster Trends Analyst with Google Zürich. He works closely with the teams Teams Webmaster Central, Sitemaps and Search Quality and looks after the English speaking Google Webmaster Help discussion forums.

Luis is Head of Global Search Marketing at The LEGO Group, and defines the strategy for organic and paid search activity globally for the iconic toy company. On these years in the company, Luis managed Search Marketing in a global organization that reaches both children and parents with engaging content in more than 140 markets.

He is a regular writer and speaker about Search Marketing and business leadership and plays an active role in the search community by participating at conferences, judging industry awards and being part of advisory boards. He is also member of the Board of Directors of SEMPO. Luis comes from a technical background on computer science and has more than 14 years' experience in Search Marketing with cross-functional expertise in technology and business management and leadership.

Tristan Niewöhner is founder and managing director of persomatch GmbH. His goal is to transfer and automate the great possibilities of search engine marketing to personnel acquisition. After his studies in Paderborn, Peking and Illinois he focused intensively on the startup scene. In addition to other start-ups in the IT sector, he worked as a founder coach for TecUP at the University of Paderborn and as an entrepreneur in residence for the Founders Foundation (Bertelsmann Stiftung).

Jason is the Senior Product Owner for SEO at Booking.com, overseeing both international SEO campaigns and landing page creation teams. Graduating form Brighton University, he's been toiling away at SEO for years at for small agencies, in-house SEO at Viator & TripAdvisor and now trying to scale his passion in Amsterdam. 

Dan Petrovic is Australia's best-known name in the field of search engine optimisation. His research and experiments have drawn attention of the worldwide community and major industry blogs. Dan is a frequent blogger and a speaker at all major Australian and select international search industry events. Conference delegates describe him as a passionate presenter with practical and actionable approach. Dan holds a multimedia degree from Griffith University in Brisbane, where he often presents as a guest lecturer and contributes to quality of teaching material as a member of the curriculum advisory board. Best way to get in touch with Dan is through Google+.

Rasmus Porsgaard has a background in Marketing and Statistics, which fits well in to the modern day Large Scale PPC world. Having worked in Marketing around the world (Copenhagen, Chicago and San Francisco) he settled in Munich in 2014 and founded Holidu together with brothers Johannes and Michael Siebers. Today Holidu is live in 21 different countries, with a focus on PPC as a user acquisition and revenue generating channel. 

As Head of SEM, Martin Röttgerding is in charge of search engine advertising at Bloofusion, an online marketing agency specializing in SEO and SEM. He is responsible for all SEM activities in Germany, Austria and Switzerland. In addition, the business information scientist researches in the field of search engine advertising, in particular Google AdWords. On the one hand, he pursues theoretical questions such as the functionality of quality factors, on the other hand, he also continues to work on one or the other campaign and tests the subtleties and limits of the AdWords system. He regularly writes about new findings, tips and current developments in the search radar, the Internet captain blog and the professional blog "PPC Epiphany".

Tomek Rudzki heads the R&D team at Elephate, an international SEO agency focusing on research, data and execution for premier brands. He is also the writer of the enormously popular The Ultimate Guide to JavaScript SEO.

Christian Scharmüller, born in 1984, is Head of Sales at Smarter Ecommerce (smec) and responsible for the strategic development of key accounts. He studied financial management and marketing in Linz (Austria) and worked at Red Bull, Premier Marketing, Easystaff and FerRobotics before eventually joining Smarter Ecommerce in 2010. He is a charismatic and captivating speaker who loves to share paid search insights on the big stages of the PPC world.

Martin Schirmbacher studied law in Berlin and London and has been a lawyer with HÄRTING Rechtsanwälte in Berlin since 2005. He advises companies in many areas of technology and, for example, accompanies software companies in contract negotiations, examines online business concepts, advises on the introduction of innovative forms of online advertising and shows ways to the legally secure business ideas. Schirmbacher regularly publishes in relevant trade journals and online in search radars, at OnPage.org and Absolit on various online advertising topics. His practical handbook "Online-Marketing- und Social Media Recht" has just been published in a new edition. Further information is available here: www.online-marketing-recht.de

During his graduation Tim was more interested in the online shop of his mother's company than in school books. Besides his studies in Vienna and Barcelona Tim founded two companies which used e-commerce as a sales channel and worked as SEA & SEO freelancer for a digital management consultancy in Zurich & Vienna.

With opening up the the performance marketing agency SEM4Equity, together with his partner Joseph Butler, he focused completely on search engine marketing. In 2016 he rebranded it to Slash.digital and the following restructuring to a Digital Marketing Agency paved the way to develop more and more innovative projects and concepts to build up competences beyond the search engine. One of the most important strategic steps was to focus on neuromarketing and the associated target group analysis and determination in order to maximize the impact on buying behavior.

Meanwhile his area of responsibility has moved more into consulting and Tim claims to be a "Digital Marketing Technologist" himself. He combines Data Driven Marketing with CRM and E-Commerce and tinkers with full passion with developers and marketing colleagues on automatic scripts and machine learning concepts to apply them to various projects.

In his spare time, he's usually seen on a basketball court or with his girlfriend on a beach in South America, trying to do digital detox.

Manfred is an online marketing expert and a Head of DACH markets at Yandex. He has extensive experience in managing high-budget campaigns for global brands in European markets and in top-tier partner relationships. He's worked on client, agency and search engine side.

Liesa Schulz has been working in the online & eCommerce sector for 6 years. At Smarketer she has been working for over 3 years as Senior SEA Growth Strategist & Consultant. Besides the support and strategic optimization of her clients for Google Ads and Bing, she is responsible for internal trainings & coaching. She is also a regular speaker and external consultant. Smarketer is the largest pure Google Ads agency in the D-A-CH region, serving medium-sized and large companies.

Dominik Schwarz is Chief Inbound Officer at HomeToGo, the search engine for vacation rentals and holiday apartments. The internationally operating company is one of the fastest-growing start-ups in Germany (Gründerszene). The Berlin-based SEO team is winner of the SMX Advanced Seattle "In-house Team of the Year" award 2018 as well as the "Organic Team of the Year" and "Chair's Selection" (THE DRUM).

Previously, Schwarz worked at KAYAK, a flight and hotel comparison company, where he oversaw more than 30 local US-based markets as Director SEO Europe. Schwarz is publisher of the In-House SEO platform VERTICALINHOUSE (DE). He lives and works in Berlin.

Dominique Seppelt is Head of Content Marketing at Peak Ace AG. Together with her team, she develops internationally scalable, innovative content marketing concepts and strategies. She ensures brand awareness, traffic increase, lead generation, customer conversion and customer retention for her customers through target group relevant content and dynamic outreach strategies. Peak Ace AG is an internationally active performance marketing agency founded in 2007 and based in Berlin. With more than 100 employees, the agency implements campaigns in over 20 languages at native speaker level and is one of the fastest growing technology companies in Germany.

Izzi Smith is an SEO Manager at Sixt rent a car, where she focuses on driving the performance of the US and UK markets, but also helps develop global Sixt rent a car SEO strategies and projects. She’s originally from Manchester in the North West of England but moved to work at Sixt in Munich in 2014.

During her time in SEO, Izzi developed a strong passion for all things Search but especially got invested in Structured Data, UX, local search and technical SEO. Izzi’s projects and experimentations with user-centric content and Structured Data won Sixt the 2018 SEMY Award for ‘Best SEO Campaign’ and her successes and passions led her to begin speaking at conferences in 2018. Since then has been rated the top speaker at several major SEM events and co-runs a weekly Online Marketing edutainment podcast.

Martin is a developer advocate on the Webmaster Trends Analyst team at Google Switzerland. In this role, he helps developers and content creators to build great content on the web. He is involved with the web standards community as well as the global web and JavaScript developer community, working to keep the web open.

Sarah Stein is an editor at SWR.Online in Mainz. She is an expert in data analytics and A/B testing, and develops search engine optimization strategy at SWR from a content perspective. Sarah Stein was the first volunteer for Digital Publishing at the Rhein-Zeitung and has been developing new formats in a local journalism such as Facebook live coverage since 2016.

Sarah studied Literature and Political Science in Trier and Milan and also got a degree in Social Media Management from TH Cologne. Sarah writes a travel blog Annafranziska and creates travel stories for the SWR-Radio.

Jim Sterne is an international consultant focused on measuring the value of the online marketing for creating and strengthening customer relationships since 1993. Sterne has written seven books on using the Internet for marketing, produces the eMetrics Summit - www.emetrics.org and is co-founder and current Chairman of the Digital Analytics Association - www.DigitalAnalyticsAssociation.org

Nichola is founder and managing director of Erudite, a technical marketing agency who deliver significant growth to clients from SEO, CRO and web analytics. Nichola founded Erudite in 2010 having previously worked at Yahoo! as head of UK search partnerships and has steered Erudite to become a multi-award winning business, well respected by peers. Erudite are the creators of the Hreflang Sitemap Tool, used by over 3,000 agencies and technical SEO practitioners across the world.

Patrick Stox is a technical SEO for IBM. He's an organizer for the Raleigh SEO Meetup (the most successful SEO Meetup in the US) and the Beer and SEO Meetup. He's an organizer for the Raleigh SEO Conference and runs a free practical SEO training course in Raleigh. He writes a monthly column for Search Engine Land and speaks at various search conferences. Patrick was a judge for a 2017 and 2018 US Search Awards and 2017 and 2018 UK Search Awards. Patrick runs a Technical SEO Slack group with JR Oakes and Paul Shapiro and is a moderator for /r/TechSEO on Reddit. Finalist for SEO Speaker of the Year and SEO Contributor of the Year at the 2018 Search Engine Land Awards.

As a Product Owner Data Science at Booking.com, Shalini Sukumar is responsible for using data to drive product decisions and create the best possible customer experience at Booking.com. The data analysis and algorithms developed by the data science teams touch all customer interactions, contributing to more than 1.4M room nights reserved per day across Booking.com's website and mobile apps. Supported by ongoing experimentation, the teams continuously leverage data to enhance the user experience, working in close collaboration with developers, business and product owners to meet the unique needs of different types of traveller and further the company's mission of empowering people to experience the world .

Originally from India, Shalini moved to Singapore to pursue her BE in Computer Engineering from Nanyang Technological University. Subsequently, she spent 12 years in Singapore and 3 years in the United States of America, before starting her next journey with Booking.com in Amsterdam. 

As an avid technology enthusiast, Shalini has worked in various technology roles in the past, which range from a summer internship at ebay, to being a developer for 4 years in the IT department at the Credit Suisse Investment Banking division. Prior to joining Booking.com, Shalini worked as a Data Product Owner at a Big Data start-up, Crayon Data, in Singapore.

The Information Age has taken the world by storm in the 21st century. Shalini is excited for the impact big data could have on technology and passionate about witnessing the growth of data science as a discipline.

Kaspar Szymanski, SEO consultant and former member of the Google Search Quality Team, is one of the few search experts with years of experience in the design and implementation of Google's internal guidelines, web spam prevention and has a high reputation as a speaker at SEO events. Since the founding of SearchBrothers.com, he has been advising companies and specializing in the successful handling of manual Google penalties and search engine optimization.

Marcus Tandler, also known as "Mediadonis", is co-founder and co-managing director of RYTE (formerly OnPage.org), a multiple award-winning software for sustainable website quality management. Marcus loves SEO and has been active in SEO since 1998. With the launch of Google in Germany in 2000, he grew up with Google and its search algorithm. He is a frequent speaker at conferences around the globe such as TEDx, LeWeb, The Next Web, SMX and O´Reilly´s web2.0expo. In addition, he has also given lectures at in-house events of large corporations such as Google, Facebook and Microsoft. Marcus holds a master's degree from the University of Augsburg and a diploma in media marketing from the Bavarian Academy for Advertising and Marketing in Munich. Today he is a lecturer at the University of Applied Sciences Würzburg-Schweinfurt, the University of Applied Sciences Munich and the University of Applied Sciences Salzburg. In April 2017 Marcus was awarded "European Search Personality of the Year" at the European Search Awards in Krakow.

Ross originally cut his teeth at a big box agency, working with some of the biggest sites in the world from the Royal Bank of Scotland to Tripadvisor. Now the managing director at Type A Media, Ross spends his time researching new SEO practices and business processes to help drive operational efficiency and gain results faster for his clients. He is a regular on the SEO circuit having spoke at Brighton SEO and Ungagged as well as countless meetups and business events. He is also a keen content creator, hosting SEMrush webinars, providing expert comment on industry blogs as well as hosting a weekly SEO show called the Canonical Chronicle.

Shari Thurow has optimized, architected, and designed websites since 1995 and is outsourced to many firms worldwide. As a pioneer in the area of search-engine friendly Web site design, she has a 100% success rate for getting client sites ranked at the top of search engines.

She currently serves on Editorial Advisory Board of the ASLIB Journal of Information Management (AJIM). She also served on the Board of Directors of the Information Architecture Institute (IAI) and the User Experience Professionals Association (UXPA).

She is the author of Search Engine Visibility, which has been translated into French, Japanese, Korean, Polish, and Russian. Her book When Search Meets Web Usability shows how to bridge the gap between a search-engine query and your website.

Omni Marketing Interactive is a full-service SEO, website usability, information architecture (IA) and web design firm. Clients include Huffington Post, Sony Music, Microsoft, Expedia, Home Depot, HSBC, Encyclopedia Britannica, the National Cancer Institute, and WebMD.

Jenna Tiffany is Founder & Strategy Director at Let'sTalk Strategy providing strategic consultancy services across the digital marketing mix. Jenna is a Chartered Marketer and elected Fellow of the IDM with over ten years’ marketing experience across both B2B and B2C. Jenna has consulted with brands such as Shell, Hilton and World Duty Free to name a few on digital and email marketing strategy.

As a recognised expert, Jenna is an elected member of the prestigious DMA UK Email Marketing Council, the Chair of the Email Best Practice hub shaping the industry’s best practice and involved in developing the latest research. Jenna is also a marketing tutor teaching CIM courses as well as a competent public speaker and publisher, speaking regularly at hundreds of marketing events across Europe. Jenna regularly gets interviewed for her thoughts on the latest trends in email marketing and recently authored Smart Insights guide to creating a successful welcome email journey.

Jenna is 2018's Chair for the Digital Growth Unleashed and Email Innovation Summit London events. 

Marcus Tober studied computer science in Berlin. During his study he developed the well-known SEO platform linkvendor.com in early 2005. At the same time he built the largest online greeting cards platform in Germany with millions of visitors every month. Because of his passion to SEO he decided to focus on Searchmetrics and its Enterprise SEO platform and sold the Ecards and more GmbH in 2008 to the largest European company builder Rocket Internet. Today Searchmetrics is a leader in Enterprise Search Analytics solutions with more than 180 employees and offices in Berlin, San Mateo, London and Paris. Searchmetrics mission is to deliver the knowledge and the platform to successfully increase companies organic and social search traffic. Companies like Siemens, ebay, Verizon, Airbnb, Tripadvisor, T-Mobile, Symantec and Lufthansa trust Searchmetrics.

Frederick (“Fred”) Vallaeys was one of the first 500 employees at Google where he helped grow the AdWords search marketing system and served as Google’s AdWords Evangelist, teaching advertisers about which Google products are best to support their marketing goals. He was a key player on several of the teams that made AdWords into the leading platform for search marketing, including the team that started the AdWords Editor, the one that acquired Urchin (now Google Analytics) and one that started conversion tracking. He has contributed his technical expertise to several AdWords books including bestsellers like “AdWords for Dummies,” “Advanced Google AdWords”, and “Quality Score in High Definition”.

Today he is the founder and Chief Marketing Technologist of Top Tier Marketing, an online marketing agency specializing in AdWords strategy and management. He is also the Cofounder of Optmyzr, an AdWords tool company that makes a Historical Quality Score Tracker, One-Click AdWords Optimizations and other tools to make account management more efficient.

Matt Vignieri is the Managing Director for Kenshoo UK (LTD) based in London managing Kenshoo’s sales and operations across the UK and EU region. Vignieri has spent the last 5 years at Kenshoo in a variety of roles including leading the World-Wide Strategic Client Team working with the world’s most sophisticated advertisers and agencies. Prior to Kenshoo Vignieri led strategic accounts for Oracle Corporation representing Customer and Social Experience Solutions for the organisation.

Throughout Vignieri’s career, he has focused on solving customer experience and loyalty challenges for companies across a wide variety of industries and markets. Vignieri has personally made customer experience a core value and deliverable to his clients as it relates to his role in assisting them to achieve their business and revenue goals. Vignieri has worked for industry leaders in a career that has spanned over 30 years.

From a personal perspective, Vignieri is especially proud of the success of his 4 children, all professionals in their own right. When not travelling the globe or working with clients, Vignieri enjoys photography and producing his own videos. 

Named by Adweek on their 2018 Young Influentials List, Purna specializes in digital marketing, AI, and the future of search. In 2016 she was named by PPC Hero as the #1 Most Influential Expert in the world. She is a regular keynote speaker at conferences across the globe such as AdWeek, DMEXCO, The Next Web Conference and INBOUND. An award-winning former journalist, Purna is also a columnist for Search Engine Land and Moz. In her spare time, she is an avid traveler, aspiring top chef and amateur knitter. 

Marlen Voelkner works as an SEA Consultant at online marketing agency Bloofusion Germany. She works with e-commerce clients to strategically use their budgets and increase their performance. Striving for state-of-the-art solutions, she always stays on top of the latest news and trends. She regularly writes for the Bloofusion Blog and for the online marketing magazine suchradar. You can also find her on YouTube, where she talks about Google Ads in her German series “Frag Bloofusion”.

Markus Vollmert has long been involved in online marketing and is at home with numbers and data. As founder and managing director of luna-park in Cologne, he deals with tracking and data for websites and campaigns. Luna-park is a certified Google Marketing Platform Partner for Google Analytics, Tag Manager and other tools and serves customers from a wide variety of industries in the field of analytics and search. Markus is also the author of "Google Analytics - Das umfassende Handbuch" published by Rheinwerk Verlag.

Liam Wade is the Head of PPC at full-service digital agency Impression. He leads a team of 8 pay-per-click experts, across paid search, display and paid social channels. The Impression team were recently voted Best Small PPC Agency at the 2017 European Search Awards. Liam prides himself on taking an innovative, data-driven approach to PPC, with a particular focus on ecommerce. He is also an accomplished and energetic speaker, speaking at events nationally and internationally. Speaking at HeroConf London 2017 on advanced Shopping campaigns, Liam was voted 'Most Actionable' by conference attendees. In his spare time, he likes to collect stamps, count marbles and create intricate architectural sculptures out of wheat-based cereals. 

Stephan Walcher has more than 11 years of experience in online marketing.

During his career he worked in various positions for well-known companies such as Microsoft Deutschland GmbH, Catbird Seat GmbH, 1&1 Mail Media GmbH and OnPage.org. In 2017 he joins One Advertising GmbH (a diva-e.com company) as Team Lead SEO Travel. Since August 2018 he is responsible as Team Lead SEO Consulting.

David is the Head of Content Marketing at Edit, leading the PR, content and outreach strategies for some of the biggest brands around the globe. With a background in business management and marketing, David has a deep understanding of the wider marketing mix and how this contributes to a brand's bottom line.

Sven has been involved in search for the last 10 years. His focus lies in automation to improve the performance of paid search accounts. Despite feeling at home when browsing the Google Ads interface, he is continually looking for strategies to enable him to use it as little as possible. Automated bidding strategies are an important part of that. He will use his substantial experience in lead generation and e-commerce performance advertising to give you actionable insights on the implementation of automated bidding strategies and how to avoid the most common pitfalls in the context of international marketing. When Sven is not tweaking search or social media campaigns, he is usually found swimming in one of Berlin´s public pools.

Nick has worked in digital marketing since 1998. Moving to Russia in 2003 he specialised in multilingual search and broadening his knowledge across digital channels, content and PR. During this time he contributed to the Russian digital startup community; working with Yandex, the Federal Assembly of the Russian Federation and the US State Department.
Returning to the UK in 2011, Nick then built and led marketing teams at Arena Media, Havas Media Group and the Dentsu Aegis Network. As the technical SEO lead at Vodafone Group since 2014, he has improved online performance and customer experience across 22 international markets.  As an advocate for raising standards in online marketing, Nick judges the UK Search Awards and EU Search Awards. He enjoys speaking at conferences on the topics of mobile/data-first marketing, cross-channel campaigns and technical SEO. Outside work, he enjoys cycling and taking part in Prince’s Trust cycling events.

Oliver Zenglein is managing director at SEM Boutique. Before that, the business economist (Diplom-Betriebswirt (FH)) and advertising merchant managed the online marketing of windeln.de, was responsible for the worldwide online marketing of the dating agency be2 and worked as online marketing manager at Scout24.

Oliver has been giving Google Ads seminars for professionals at 121WATT since 2009 and is blogging at http://sem-boutique.de/magazin.

Arbresha is a Business Analyst, a successful CMO and a passionate digital strategy expert. Her mission: Close the gap between companies and customers and combine the virtual with the real world.Track down the right channels and multipliers for your online business and use them strategically for efficient and successful online marketing. As a what-if visionary, she asks the right questions, finds creative solutions, and creates digital innovations that demand technical know-how and vision. In doing so, Arbresha uses her ability to sharpen the perception and thinking of her counterpart. A competence that meets the core of our fast-moving and dynamic world. Because only those who constantly question themselves can look competitive, independent and self-sufficient into the digital future.