The Razorfish search team often gains access to beta opportunities ahead of other advertisers, offering the chance to test new opportunities and learn what is effective to improve and scale campaign performance.

Last year Google released a new beta ad format called Sitelinks, which can be a great way to learn more about the intent of your brand searchers and improve their search experience.

Example of a Google Sitelinks Ad:

If your ads meet a certain quality threshold, you may be eligible to run site links. With Sitelinks, advertisers can submit up to 10 links and Google will select the four most relevant links to serve for any given query.

Clearly the new ad format is designed to improve CTR and relevancy. We polled our national team to find out who has tested it and how it’s working. 78% said they have tested Sitelinks and it had a positive impact on performance.

Have you tested Google Sitelinks? Tell us what you think!

This year, the Razorfish Search team sent Shawn Cheng, Search Account Manager at Razorfish, to SXSW Interactive and he returned rejuvenated. We’re excited to share his thoughts on his first trip to the festival in Austin, TX and we particularly love his SXSW Approval Matrix (with apologies and thanks to New York Magazine).

Being this was my first SXSW and the conference has been going on since 1987, I had a lot of catching up to do. SXSW has been a music festival since 1987. In 1994, the Film and Interactive portions were born. Tech evangelists, serious start ups and hordes of VCs make pilgrimages to Austin to check out the newest technology.

The back of every SXSW’I program lists attendees by company. I noticed that most companies only had a handful of representatives, but under ‘R’ there was a fat block of 40 Razorfishers, demonstrating our commitment to innovation. We were born digital, we bleed digital and we’re looking for people with the same passion. Did I mention we’re hiring?

I was lucky enough to be a part of SXSW history, as the Interactive attendance of 12,000+ outnumbered the Music portion for the first time in the festival’s 23-year history. I created this SXSW Approval Matrix to capture the spirit of my experience at the festival.

SXSW Interactive Approval Matrix

If you attended, I want to hear from you! Did I miss any noteworthy events that deserve a place in one of the four quadrants? Do you think I misclassified something?

It’s been a few weeks since Microsoft announced that Bing would start integrating Foursquare into Bing Maps. Avid Foursquare users know that sharing and consuming location-based data with your friends can be a helpful, if not fun, way to explore cities. When Microsoft announced the new integration, we immediately wondered if this meant that users would be more apt to use Bing Maps and if there was an advertising opportunity for local businesses. The Razorfish search team weighed in and the response is pretty split as to whether this integration will prove beneficial to Microsoft and local businesses (although more are optimistic).

Tell us what you think by taking our QuickPoll:

To be fair to Search Engine Land, its editors declaimed the opinions of guest writer Matt Van Wagner of Find Me Faster. Van Wagner’s article, The Pitfalls Of A/B Ad Split Testing, Part 2, might as well have been titled “The Pitfalls of Pointless Analysis,” given how it goes on about matters insignificant to the business of improving results through SEM.

Though A/B testing is crucial to success in this pursuit, it’s not a simple thing to get right. Beginners seeking pearls of wisdom in Van Wagner’s lengthy piece would be better off asking their engine sales rep (who are probably not accomplished testers, either, but then again some of them were trained at Razorfish).

Van Wagner offers a free lobster dinner (he’s from New Hampshire, where crustaceans are currency) for help with the common A/B test conundrum of a winning ad that performs poorly on its own.

He correctly identifies the problem — lack of a true A/B split among rotated ads — but gets woefully lost on the way to a solution, considering complications from custom ad serving, search histories, repeat queries and something he calls “over optimization” without identifying the classic culprit of a back-test failure.

He should have asked: Were any of the keywords in this problematic test on broad match?

By far, the most common faulty assumption in search A/B testing is that both ads are eligible to show on the same query set. This is only true on exact match. Beyond exact, the eligible query set expands (i.e. broad match gets broader) for the ad with the higher CTR. During a test attempt, the ad earning the higher CTR for the shared query set will seem to suffer a CTR reduction as the engine finds the maximum yield (for itself) via query-set expansion. Sustained A/B tests on broad match routinely “fail” to achieve a significant result as the algorithm automatically challenges the winner, driving its CTR down. The test isn’t really a failure, because increasing yield is what the algorithm is designed to do.

This scenario causes confusion about the value of A/B testing in search. But there is no controversy: Understanding how paid search works enables experts to test to our hearts’ content. And the learning that pours in from a correctly executed A/B testing program makes our clients enough wampum to buy their own lobster.

On February 25th, Razorfish hosted a search panel at our New York office.  Despite the Snowicane, we had many clients, industry leaders and enthusiasts in attendance. Having been in search for 5 years, the event reminded me how much I enjoy being a search marketer.

We’ll be posting video clips of the panels soon, but in the meantime I want to share my personal highlights of the night (in no particular order):

I learned that some companies do have a grasp of how online behavior affects offline sales: Brian McDevitt, Head of Retail at Google, told us that the CEO of Macy’s is able to say that every dollar spent online at Macys.com influences $5.77 spent in stores within 10 days after an online purchase

Adam Heimlich, Group Search Director at Razorfish, reminded me why prognosticating on the future of search isn’t always a rewarding experience. Users move quickly to adopt new technologies if they’re useful. But big businesses adapt to change at a snail’s pace.

Doug McMillen, National Mobile Search Specialist at Microsoft, got me really excited about mobile. He compared  mobile right now to the entrepreneurial spirit of the Internet in the 90′s and early 00′s, when hugely successful companies like Zappos, Netflix and Amazon were built around the Internet. My question is: who will be among the first to effectively build businesses around mobile as a medium?  Those who figure it out will become the companies that competitors will spend years trying to catch up to.

By: Jamie Ross