If you’re an SEM for a major retailer, you probably have thousands of SKUs and possibly millions of keywords you could consider bidding on. But with only 24 hours in a day, and a limited number of people on your team, it’s impossible to manage millions of keywords – you’ve got to simplify somewhere, right? Maybe you only market your top selling SKUs. Maybe you use broad match aggressively.
These may seem like reasonable strategies for optimizing your retail SEM efforts, but they’re fundamentally undermining the overall performance of your campaign. As an online retailer, it’s hugely important for you to mine the long tail of queries. Here’s why.
- Long-tail keywords are more qualified. Consider “Skechers” (a head query) versus “Skechers tennis shoes for women size 7” (a long tail query). The long-tail query probably represents a consumer who is further down the purchase funnel. She’s more likely to convert into purchase if the right ad and landing page are presented to her.
- You can deliver much more targeted marketing to long-tail queries. With the head term “Skechers,” you can, at best, deliver an ad that says something like “Find great deals on Skechers shoes.” With the long-tail query, you can deliver this much more relevant ad: “Ladies Skechers tennis shoes, 20% off today!” On the landing page side, for the head term the best you can do is deliver the visitor to a search result page that shows all types of Skechers shoes you carry. For the tail term, you can deliver the visitor to a page showing only women’s tennis shoes that are made by Skechers, in size 7. With tail terms, you not only have a more qualified, motivated buyer – you’re also able to deliver marketing that is customized to your visitor’s intent.
- Long-tail keywords on exact match have a competitive advantage over head keywords on broad match. If “skechers” on broad match versus “skechers tennis shoes for women size7” on exact match are given the same max CPC, the exact match query will probably be placed in a higher position than the broad match term on either Google or Bing. The search engines are likely to assign a much higher predicted CTR for the exact match, which affects quality score and position (normalized for bid).
- Long-tail keywords are much cheaper than head terms. Head terms are obvious, sought-after and invite more competition. Tail-terms require more work and analysis. As a result, there are fewer competitors on tail terms, and max CPCs tend to be lower on tail terms.
- Finally long-tail keywords are much more profitable for you, for all the reasons stated above:More Qualified Buyers + More Targeted Marketing = Better Conversion!
Better Conversion + Lower Max CPCs = Increased Profitability!
What’s that? Seems like it’s just way too hard to manage all those long tail keywords and not worth the effort? More on that in my next post.
