Of Long Tails and Paid Search Campaigns

Nimish Vohra, India Head, Regalix
Long tail: harnessing the spread out masses

Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we could efficiently harness all the energy from sun rays that seep through clouds or tidal waves across the vast coast lines? Till now all our efforts have not been very encouraging – energy output being less than the input. Switch to media messages. While it is quite efficient to spread mass messages in communities concentrated in small places, the efficacy drops drastically as one tries to have an interactive communication with spread out niches. But the nature of media has changed, and continues to evolve at a breakneck speed. Ever heard of an ad spot on television for INR 500? Not so strange with online media!

Long tail as a concept is now being applied to many diverse areas of online interactions, paid search marketing being one of them, which we will explore in some detail in this article.

Search engines, words and keywords

Words play a very important role in mapping the human world to the computer world. Google, Yahoo, etc, have done a great job indexing (in layman terms, creating copies of) all the patterns of words (articles, blog posts, etc) humans have written and posted on the web. You search for information with a few words (keywords, to the initiated), and search engines show the content they consider to be the closest match – this is called organic search. They also show information that other people (advertisers) think are related to what you have searched – these snippets of information are called ads, part of paid search, also commonly called PPC.

Paid search and the Core

Lets consider an example: say, I have an online travel agency, and I promote it on search engines, by advertising on keywords such as “train tickets”, “air tickets”, “cheap tickets”, “delhi mumbai flight ticket” (there might be 100 such keywords). Since these core keywords directly capture what I am selling, if my messaging on ad creatives and landing pages is right, I would potentially have a high conversion rate (CR). The problem here is that there would be many other people bidding for the same keywords, and hence cost per acquisition (CPA) would be extremely high.

Paid search and the Tail

If I wish to get more leads than what the above core keywords can give, what do I do? I look for words that a user might be searching for that are related to the core keywords – such as, “tourist guide bangalore”, “things to do in Delhi”, “tourist destinations india”, etc – there could be 500 such keywords. The conversion rate on these keywords would be lower, as fewer people might digress from what they are doing, into what we are promoting. To maintain an acceptable CPA, I would of course need to bid a little lower on these keywords.

What if I wish to really get into the tail keywords – keywords that are much less related to the core ones? Keywords such as “maps delhi”, “monuments”, “travel”, “tourist”, “cab bangalore” – there might be 50,000 such keywords out there to be discovered. These keywords are two or more degrees away from the core, so CR would be quite low. Again, for an acceptable CPA one would need to bid reasonably low.

Is long tail really useful?

One might argue that the CPA from the long tail would be very high, for any reasonable bid; for lower bids, one would anyways not get too many impressions, so does not matter much. This might not necessarily be the right way to look at it. Usually for a business, number of leads at an acceptable overall CPA (ideally mapped to the actual sale) is of importance. Campaigns can be set up to track overall CPA (or marketing $ dollars spent per sale) so that internal fluctuations can be taken care of. Also, with a long tail approach, one can potentially find ‘hidden gems’ that one would otherwise have lost out on. In other words, it might be nearly impossible to discover at first go, all the keywords that are important to the business; having a broader approach will allow you to discover keywords that are useful. For B2B campaigns, long tail helps identify people in different stages of buying, and target them accordingly.

Challenges with the long tail

Managing a long tail of keywords can prove to be difficult. Just finding keywords, and applying the right bids is not so difficult – many existing tools would help one do this. Organizing keywords into relevant groups, finding messaging that bridges the gap between the core offering and the tail keywords, managing the messaging at creative and landing pages level can get to be a daunting task. If not done right, quality score on search engines can reduce, which will spiral up the CPC, rendering the campaign useless. This is where new breed of tools are required – ones that can create hundreds of customized messages to go with the thousands of keywords. Given these challenges, if not intelligently managed, the operational costs of managing tail campaigns can be high.

Summary

To sum up, here are a couple of dos: Before you take the plunge into a long tail, know the space well – understand the core. Keep your tools handy that help you mine data and refine campaigns, and to manage multiple targeted messaging in parallel.

Long tails can be extremely powerful in unlocking the complete potential of any space. Watch out for long tails all around you – number of books you see in a large bookshop but will never read, number of kids who play cricket aspiring to be professionals, number of stocks that lag the market, number of coin tosses that would lead to a series of 20 heads in a row, and so on… In the ‘long tail’ of your life, may there be a continuous flow of joy, and not just spots of merriment! :-)