The Problem with Long Tail Keywords

By Brian Carter on May 2, 2008 8:12 PM | | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)
 

ratoncat.jpg

Long tail schmong tail.  I'm sick of the long tail! 

It's one of those industry concepts that comes out of nowhere one day and

  • Everyone gets excited, and
  • Seth Godin writes a book about it, and then
  • Everyone says it all the time, and
  • Yadda yadda yadda.


Yeah, long tail is cool and it's valid.  Yes, it's key to niche marketing and it's great for SEO.

But let me tell you where I think the long tail can get you into trouble... where we need to snip that long tail off:

Pay Per Click.

That's right, long tail can really mess up your pay per click marketing.

Now, don't go telling me that you need long tail keywords for your niche searches and that by segmenting adgroups and providing different ad messages to people, you can reach more people and get more conversions...

I know. That's true, to an extent.

But the dirty little secret of PPC is that 95% of your conversions come from 5% of your keywords.

Really.

The others keywords either

  • Don't perform (100 clicks and no conversions), or
  • The clicks roll in so slowly that you won't have the statistical confidence to delete them until the year 2112 (yay, Rush!).

So what percentage of your clicks are long tail clicks that haven't converting, aren't providing ROI?  What percentage of your money is leaking down that long tail?  (Yuck, that sounds gross!)

(And by the way, what is this animal in the analogy for a long tail?  We had quite a debate about that here at Fuel... is it a rat?  A cat? An armadillo?  A whale?  We discovered that giraffes have the longest tails in nature, but their long necks totally mess up the analogy.  If it has to be a big head and a long tail... well I don't know, what do you think?)

If you're not careful, you could spend 30% or more of your click money on these unproven long tail keywords.  That drags down your overall ROAS.

I'm not saying STOP doing ALL longtail.  What I suggest is simply

  1. Measure the % of your spend that's going to long tail keywords,
  2. Compare that to your account's overall current profitability, and
  3. Evaluate whether that ratio makes sense.

In other words, make a conscious decision what % of your PPC spend you want to go to unproven long tail keywords.

And if you need to really maximize ROI in the short-term you can pause these long tail terms completely.

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3 Comments

David Snyder said:

I get your point, and think you have some valid ideas.

However, what I have seen to be true, measurably true, is that longtail terms tend to be more conversion focused than the more basic search terms

For example, someone searching "candy" isn't as prone to buy as someone searching "mars bar candy in miami"

This is really where you SEO and PPC campaigns need to work together. If you can organically rank for longails then you do not need them in your PPC, but if a longtail term you experiment or fall into shows quality conversion then you should think about bidding on those terms if you cannot achieve quality organic rankings for them.

I think you have a nice concept about measuring how useful in terms of conversion your longtails are when bidding on them. To be honest this is a good exercise for all keywords being utilized in your PPC account.

May 4, 2008 10:55 AM
Brian Carter said:

David, great point. I agree, those are smart keywords. They are part of the long tail in that they are less popular searches than the general top level terms. I think of the subgroup you're referring to as "specific terms that are closer to the conversion".

But any keywords that are costing you money but not producing conversions- no matter how good they look in theory- are my concern here.

No matter how close to a conversion a keyword appears to be when you first select it, the only way to know how it will perform is to run it, and if it's not getting results quickly, and you have a bunch of slow-to-give-statistics non-converting keywords, they still drag down your overall ROI.

May 4, 2008 1:14 PM
Scott Clark said:

In many cases use of longtail strategy is an exact-match replacement for broad (or worse, automatic) match terms - but with a common-sense review of the phrases.

The long-tail strategy also allows you to pass keyphrases that makes sense into the parameters of the landing pages to make them adapt on the fly. You can adjust your Title, H1, imgs, and more using that information - which can increase your quality score on Google and lower you CPC. With Broad match or Automatic Match, you cannot do this at all.

But more importantly, this can increase conversions a LOT in some situations based on my experience.

May 21, 2008 10:10 AM

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