Why The Long Tail is Worth The Effort

Pursue the Long Tail (Rat Not Included)

Many people credit Chris Anderson with coining the term “long tail” in his 2004 Wired magazine article. His explanation of the long tail was applied to online merchandising, but it was quickly adopted by advertisers using Pay Per Click search marketing to drive traffic to websites with huge volumes of SKUs.

“Long tail” keywords are highly specific search phrases of three or more words that are less common than shorter more general terms for a product or service.

Most search marketers find that researching and implementing a long-tail strategy is both difficult and time consuming. Even with keyword permuters and other research tools, it is difficult for even a PPC expert to envision all the ways a user might search for their product or service. If you combine this hardship with the fact that typically the top 100 keywords in a campaign drive 60 to 90 percent of all clicks, the question becomes: why bother?

The answer to this is best illustrated by some sample campaigns in the Trada Marketplace. This advertiser has a fairly robust campaign with nearly 40k keywords. The top 40 keywords only (1 percent of the total campaign keywords) make up nearly 50 percent of the all the traffic for the campaign, however, these same top 40 keywords are only responsible for 30 percent of all of their conversions.

The lazy or unsophisticated search marketer may feel that this short keyword list is good enough because it covers the lion’s share of the market. In this specific case lazy campaign management and not developing the long tail would have come at a cost of 70 percent of the conversion volume.

The reason that long tail keywords are so effective is two fold. The first reason is because longer, more obscure search phrases typically cost less. As mentioned it can take a long time to develop a deep long-tail list and since many marketers don’t take the time the competition for these terms is lower driving down the cost. The second reason is that a search user who types a very specific query is more likely to click on your targeted ad and resonate with your product or service offering because it fits the specific need they searched for.

Trada was created in part because of our belief in the success of long-tail search strategies. While we understand that long tail strategies do not work for all advertisers we believe they can enhance most advertisers’ campaigns. We understand that it is difficult for any one person to generate an exhaustive list of long tail keywords. With the Trada model you have several optimizers working on your campaign at once, all bringing their unique perspective to the campaign. The result is a thoughtfully developed long tail keyword list that will help you uncover many low cost conversions that your current campaign would not have captured.

Cultivating a thorough long tail keyword list is not a complete panacea for underperforming campaigns. It is important that you aggressively manicure the head and the middle of the tail so that these top keywords are performing optimally. Because these keywords are generating the majority of the volume they must be constantly optimized with bid-price changes, ad copy and landing-page testing, as well as match type and negatives.

Unfortunately the truth about search is that there is no silver bullet or magic formula for success. Doing PPC search marketing well is about rolling up your sleeves and doing the work. For this reason, there are literally millions of search campaigns that are underperforming. Even campaigns run by marketers with the best intentions seem to wear their owners down. They require constant testing and analysis, exploration and refinement. When was the last time you wrote new ad copy, or explored an additional 100 keywords for your campaign?

If the answer is never or not in many months, then maybe it is time to see how your campaign could perform with group of PPC experts doing this work for you.