Lecture 11: Long Tail Keywords

On 2006, Chris Anderson published a book called "The Long Tail". He stated that the society is moving from a high demand market portion toward a number of small "hits", accumulating a huge portion in niche market tail.

Source: http://www.longtail.com/the_long_tail/about.html

We can utilize the same concept in the keyword advertisement. Instead of biding high price broad keyword with lots competition, we can bid on numerous specific keyword phrases with much lower prices to bring more conversion. The reasoning is based on the customer buying cycle. When a customer start to have an interest in buying a product, say camera, he begin to search online using board keyword "camera". After he figured out what function he want, he start to add more specific keywords, such as "full HD", "NIKKOR Lenses", etc, narrowing down to a list of particular products. Then he will do more search to compare among the list. At this point, the customer is at the end of the buying cycle and is more likely to purchase. We want to use this characteristic to target customers at the end of the cycle, placing specific keyword phrases related to the conversion we want visitors make to increase conversion rate. The assumption under this thread is that the keyword phrases are longer/specific in the long tail. The strategy is suitable for small business whose conversion is selling product, increasing cost-efficiency.

Google provides several keyword matching options for us to tailor our ads. For the broad keyword, people can use broad match. As long as one word user entered is matched to one word in your keyword phrase, the ad will showed up. Phrase match is that the ad will show up when your keyword is fully match full or part of the keywords user entered. For the long tail keyword, it's recommended the use exact keyword, which will only show up when your keyword is exactly matched to user's keyword. One another special function is negative keyword. We can utilize it to avoid the undesirable visitors.

To improve ClickThrough Rate (CTR) and conversion rate, we would like to lead visitors to the page that match their demand. Keyword assertion can help us achieve it using dynamic feature of ad. Several user might enter different keywords in the same category, so they will see the same ad box. After clicking, they are led to the different pages, which is related to the particular keyword they entered.