fabulous freeform fridays – is the long tail worth targeting?

Fabulous Freeform Fridays are your opportunity to ask me to clarify something I’ve written about, write something on a topic you want to read about or just plain ask me some questions.

Today’s Fabulous Freeform Friday was suggested by Jonothan Wright.

Is the long tail worth targeting?

Interesting question that many people just assume rather than looking at the data. I’m saying yes, but I think Jonothan wanted more than just my opinion.

The start of the official thought of the long tail (and the term itself) is really recent, just October 2004 by Chris Anderson in Wired Magazine it’s a relatively long article, but should be required reading for all business people, and particularly online and marketing types.

The long tail is that bit at the end of the graph, the yellow piece on this chart

(from wikipedia)

Green is your generic terms “Car” “Boat” etc. whereas yellow is “inlet manifold 1964 corolla” car is going to get a lot more traffic, but if you have an ad for “inlet manifold 1964 corolla” and someone searches it, you’ve got a sale.

Not a lot of people search long tail terms, that’s the point of them. Some businesses make a fortune from long tail terms (rumours about Amazons long tail range from 25% to 45% of total sales) so there is definitely potential.

What does it mean for you?

Well the yellow section of that graph just keeps going on and on and on and with two big changes to the world (ok, our world) the green section is peaking earlier and the yellow section gets fatter and fatter, meaning the yellow section actually contains more than the green.

The two changes
1. The end of the mass market
2. Search users becoming more sophisticated

With these two changes, more people are searching more long tail keywords, meaning more value from the time you put into making the long tail campaign. 

The main benefit to the long tail is its price. If you had to pay the same for a conversion on “car” as on “inlet manifold 1964 corolla” it’s a relatively easy choice to ignore the long tail keywords because of the extra work they require.

It is extremely unlikely for that to ever happen however.

So here’s what to do for long tails in AdWords (and it’s boring, sorry). What we need to do is search as many long tail terms as we can think of that are relevant to us, and see what ads show. This tells us how many competitors, how well they’re using their AdWords and how many are using the long tail (crafting ads specifically for that search or using their generic ads)

This gives us an indication of what we need to do to target the long tail.

If they’re using targeted ads, get ready for a long night or two writing ads and crafting adgroups for each tiny little cluster of keywords. Be prepared to run search query reports weekly and update the ads each time.

If they aren’t using targeted ads, you can get away with being slightly more generic and targeting “parts for old cars” instead of “inlet manifold 1964 corolla”.

The trick to using it is to be more targeted than your competition.

Of course, if you have no competition, it’s really easy.

Fabulous Freeform Fridays are your opportunity to ask questions. Something you want to know, want to hear my opinions or even have a discussion started? It’s all in your hands, post a comment on this (or any other) post if you have something you want to talk about or you can email me.

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