The Long Tail in Paid Search

March 18, 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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1 Comment

  1. Stumbled upon your blog via blog search, and I have to say that you’ve got some great ideas on PPC!

    It’s great to see someone actually point out the fact the “longtail” strategy doesn’t pay-off unless you are in high-search volume / or geographical location-specific industries. I think people get too caught up in the idea of trying to save money loading 10,000 longtails into their PPC account only to see them get nailed with a poor quality score, not to mention little of no search volume.

    I think a lot of the confusion of using longtails in PPC also comes from the fact that the advertiser doesn’t understand the proper use of negatives and match types in controlling irrelevant queries.

    Again, great article and I will become an avid reader.

    Best,
    Jason

    Comment by levrige March 20, 2008 @ 1:32 pm

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