We credit an improv class at from Upright Citizens Brigade for a new perspective on search marketing. It’s inspiring enough to share.

Yes… and

The first lesson in improv is to always “Yes…and” everything. Your improve partner tells you your name is Ichabod? “Yes, and… I’m the sixth in a long line of Ichabods.” She sets the story in ancient Rome? “Yes, and… everyone’s hygiene here could use a little work.” The premise behind the rule is that a story can’t go on unless open minds allow it to go on. If someone comes up with a brand new idea, and all you say is, “No,” there’s nowhere to go from there. If the response to a new idea is, “Yes…and tell me more,” the story evolves.

Search is a constantly evolving field, so if you’re not open to new ideas, you’ll fall behind. Search marketers learn through constant testing how a single additional word in ad copy can lead to a significant improvement in results. Keeping an open mind about new searching habits is rewarding because we can always test to see if a different approach works better than the original. The key is not to disregard something as a failure right off the bat, because you never know how the story is going to develop.

Add new elements

In improv, everyone starts off with zero information and builds from what other people say. Saying “Yes…” establishes that what was said in the past is part of a story. The function of “and” is to make sure each statement adds new information to the scene.

Your search accounts are a treasure trove of data. You might as well just draw a giant X on your computer screen because that’s the place to start digging for the first fact in a story. If impressions rose after you launched a set of keywords, “Yes… and” why? What else happened? The story could go anywhere from that point. The way to make something happen next is to add new information by extrapolating from your data set or running more tests to establish more facts.

Truth in Comedy and Search

As Del Close and Charna Halpern stressed in their book Truth in Comedy, nothing is more impactful than the truth. For improv, the truth is where we find humor. When was the last time you were on the floor with tears streaming down your face while clutching your stomach in a fit of laughter? Was it because you were watching a comedian on TV? Or was it that the situation you were in was extraordinarily hilarious? Because comedy comes from everyday life, the funniest improv always mimics ordinary circumstances.

In search, the truth is where we enhance results. Search is the only medium where people are trying to tell us what they want. SEM experts are closer to a true connection with consumers than everyone else in marketing. The way to be true to customers is to provide a satisfying experience. No gimmicks. No tricks. Just relevance and service. As improv stories earn the gift of laughter, search connections are rewarded with happy customers and exceptional results.

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.

A recent blog post from Razorfish VP @Mattgreitzer posted on our digital automotive trends and  insights Headlight Blog.

At this point most automotive marketers know that search marketing is an incredible vehicle for reaching their target customers. It’s highly relevant, highly targetable and is generally one of the most efficient and effective channels in a marketer’s ad mix. The problem with search marketing, though, is that it doesn’t scale beyond the level of user-initiated searchers. For most businesses, this is a problem, especially when their search-marketing campaigns are mature as are most campaigns of OEMs who have been active in the search space for many years.

So how can these marketers get the efficiencies of search when their search campaigns are tapped out? What are the next most efficient opportunities they can explore?

Keep reading three ways to extend a search-marketing program