The Long Tail in Paid Search - March 18th, 2008

Much, arguably too much in some respects, has been made of long tail searches in paid search engine marketing. A long tail search is a highly specific or targeted search term. It is the opposite of a generic search query. Below is an example:

“Cars” - Generic
“used 2000 cc Ford Focus” - Long tail

With regards to PPC, long tail searches tend to have a lower CPC as there are less advertisers bidding on them. As they are much more specific they generate much lower traffic levels. However they tend to have a higher propensity to convert. The long tail theory is used as one of the main selling points for professional PPC management.

However, the case can be overstated. Simply creating thousands of derivatives or modifiers such as “cheap”, “buy”, “online”, “uk” etc may impress a client but will do little to boost your ROI. This is because unless you are looking into advertising in an industry with a VERY high search volume, e.g finance / travel, most of your derivatives will never generate any impressions.

Better to do quality keyword research based on the Google keyword tool or similar, this will show you what has actually been searched for. One modifier term tagged onto the generic terms should be suitable, such as “cheap” onto “loans” or “flights”, but having phrases such as “cheapest double bed for sale online uk” will probably never get queried and will just make your paid search accounts harder to manage.

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Google Quality Score To Change Again - March 17th, 2008

Google has announced that it will start to take the page loading time into account when calculating the quality score for pay per click accounts.

Have a high quality score is essential to help minimise the cost per click that you?ll pay for each keyword, so any changes you can make to speed up the loading time should be done as soon as possible. The quality score dictates the minimum cost per click on each keyword and the position you?ll achieve for a set CPC.

This change can only be a good thing for users, although there may be several pay per click clients fretting over this latest change. The change will take place in the next few weeks and apparently publishers will have a month to make any improvements.

Other factors taken into account in the current quality score calculation include keyword relevance to ad text and landing page and click through rates.

Any good PPC manager will see this change as a positive change, as a slow loading web page leads to a high abandonment rate, which consequently affects the conversion rate ? which is the ultimate goal of any pay per click account.

Lianne
PPC Account Manager

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