In a previous post, I mentioned ways that website owners and online merchants could benefit and even learn from the mistakes that Sony made in its recent launch of their PlayStation 3 (PS3) console. As good as those suggestions were, I've since come across another source that I feel is also worth looking into... her name is Jackie, and what she can indirectly teach us about Search Engine Marketing, specifically Pay Per Click Management, is worth... well... an SES Conference Badge.

Jackie is a music director for a local Illinois grade school (2 of them actually), and she also happens to be my loving girlfriend (whom I absolutely adore). Neither of these facts has any bearing on her hidden abilities to be an excellent Pay Per Click marketer... however, I still thought they were worth mentioning.

So what can Jackie teach us about our industry? Well, I must admit that at first this story will seem to be a bit off-topic, but bear with me and I'll do my best to pull it all together.

Jackie and I love to play "MarioKart" for the Nintendo GameCube. It's not my favorite game, but I do enjoy playing it... and besides, it's always nice to find a game that she's interested in as well. She absolutely loves to play MarioKart, and does so often as a stress reliever... which I can totally relate too.

MarioKart is a racing game which features Nintendo's most well-known trademarked characters, such as Mario, Luigi, Toad, Princess Toadstool, Donkey Kong, and many more, and the goal is to race souped-up go-carts around 16 or so tracks. The kicker is, that unlike other versions of MarioKart, this one is titled "Double Dash" and forces you to race in a 2-man cart (with 2 characters).

Jackie and I are both very, very good at the game. In fact, we always seem to be competing for bragging rights on one particular track called "Baby Park". She claims that she is the best at the course, and I, being a guy, certaintly can't let her one-up me. We've decided that the best way to determine who was better between her and I at "Baby Park" was to compete in "time-trial" mode... meaning that whomever had the best race-time for the course, would ultimately be #1.

For months now, I had owned the top record for "Baby Park" making me the better player. I was very confident in my record, and thought that her every attempt to beat me was a lost-cause. I had a couple of seconds on her best time and she didn't seem to be making any ground. Did she stop... nope, not one bit... and it paid off.

I recently returned from this past SES Conference to find that she not only beat my top record, but had completely destroyed it. I was shocked. How could she have topped it? After begging for what seemed like hours, she let me in on her little secret. First of all, let me start by saying that she made every turn, cut every corner, and took every possible short cut that I did... so the difference in her time wasn't a change in technique. Her response: "Easy. I just kept partnering up different characters with different carts until it worked. Once I beat your record, I continued to tweak the combination of carts and players to achieve better results."

Absolutely Genius!

Jackie tested 306 2-player character combinations across 10 possible go-carts until she found the right player-player-cart combination that would allow her to initially beat my record. Once she did that, she continued to test alternative combinations in order to shave milliseconds off of her already untouchable record. She didn't beat my record with one session... rather with many sessions of testing, tuning, and trial and error. She literally beat me a millisecond at a time, and cracked an unforeseen algorithm that was not allowing her to succeed.

Now stop and apply that same message to Pay Per Click marketing. See where I'm going with this? It's not that her strategy is complicated or difficult to understand by any means... as Search Engine Marketers we're all aware of the need for testing and tuning. In fact, if I learned anything at all during this past SES conference it was the importance of testing and fine-tuning Pay Per Click campaigns. And now that I think of it, maybe I should have just stayed home and played MarioKart with Jackie. I would have learned the same lesson and would have saved boss-man a couple of C-notes in the process.

I was so certain of my initial accomplishment that I left well enough alone. That's not what a true marketer does. A true marketer does as Jackie did... they poke and prod and continue to improve upon their successes.

In MarioKart there are characters and carts. In Pay Per Click marketing there are titles & descriptions and landing pages. Whether you're attempting to achieve a higher lap-record or a higher click-through and conversion rate... the secret lies within testing.