I came across the following tweet a few days ago that got me thinking whether having very large PPC campaigns with hundreds (if not thousands) of long-tail keyword terms were worth it. It reminded me of a campaign I had managed in the past:
Thanks to @Szetela in his webinar for confirming my belief: don’t bother w/ a huge keyword list w/ lots of long-tail terms.
Before I dig in any further let me just say that I’m a HUGE fan of Chris Anderson’s book “The Long Tail…”. I think it’s one of those light-bulb moments you rarely get when reading these types of books.
Many PPC campaign managers have taken this book to heart and have applied it’s overall theory into practice. We carefully craft well organized PPC campaigns with tons of 3, 4…even up to 5 & 6 keyword phrases in the hopes of capturing PPC traffic at a low cost with a high Quality Score. Overall this method of creating PPC campaigns is very solid in theory. You attract people who are really vested in finding the right product, as demonstrated by the length of their search queries.
However, there comes a point where long-tail PPC campaigns can get out of hand. I recall a couple of years ago I took part in managing a large PPC campaign that targeted both head terms (2-3 keyword queries) and long-tail terms (4+ keyword queries). Overall the campaign breakdown was roughly 10%-15% head terms with the remaining part of the campaign using long-tail terms. The purpose of the campaign was to create awareness so there wasn’t any conversion per-say, but our goal was to get the most traffic with the lowest CPC.
After an afternoon of number crunching, we had found that the long-tail terms were eating up the majority of campaign management time, but yielded the lowest amount of traffic. Put another way, cumulatively the long-tail terms had less traffic than head terms even though it was roughly 85%-90% of the keywords that made up the campaign; and likely took up 80% of management time.
My overall conclusion from that experience was to avoid infinitely chasing the long-tail or else there will be diminishing returns in terms of management time spent tending to the campaign. There will come a point in a campaign where you’ve got hundreds (if not thousands) of long-tail keyword terms that it will make it very challenging for you to nimbly manage the campaign.
What’s your experience been with long-tail PPC campaigns? When considering campaign management time and costs associated with managing a campaign, has it been worth it?
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