Chasing your (SEM’s) long tail
In a previous post, I made reference to SEO’s long tail marketing. Well, Search Engine Marketing (SEM) has a long, long, long tail too.
For the sake of my discussion, I’ll refer to the three vertical industries with which I’m most familiar; employment, real estate, and automotive.
Wikipedia has a lengthy write-up about the long tail. Long Tail, generally, refers to a concept that we used to call the “80/20″ rule (ok, they’re not quite the same, but who’s counting?). The long tail is the name for a long-known feature of some statistical distributions. The feature is also known as heavy tails, power-law tails, or Pareto tails. In “long-tailed” distributions a high-frequency population is followed by a low-frequency population which gradually “tails off”. The events at the far end of the tail have a very low probability of occurrence. Because, in marketing or business, the tail is often ignored due to the fact that it’s made up of small markets, and has historically been hard to reach. Time’s a changing!
Let’s look to Search Engine Marketing (SEM) for examples. For the sake this explanation, I’ll use Google, however the same ideas would also apply with Yahoo, MSN and the others.
Search Marketing lets us target users to a very granular degree. There are lots of stories and border-line urban myth about how expensive search advertising has become. Lots of words out there (pharmaceutical words especially) can cost $10 or more (some even up to $30). Well, there’s just no need to pay that much. This is where the long tail starts to wag!
When buying traffic from a search engine, most marketing budgets simply can’t afford to buy every word all the time, so targeting is just a must. So, think of the two scenarios:
- you pay $1 for the word “jobs”
- you pay $0.30 for the phrase “teaching jobs”
Both give you a click to your site (remember, you only pay when clicked). So, you can either pay $1 for a visitor or you can pay $0.30 for a visitor. You ultimately get the same thing, so why pay more? And, in fact, if you have teaching jobs on your site, arguably the more targeted “teaching jobs” offer you a better quality visitor. The irony is that you pay less for higher quality (often). And, in fact, the better statement to make is that you pay less when you plan and execute your campaigns in a more targeted and strategic way.
For the really advanced; add geographic targeting to your campaigns and add better landing pages to your campaigns. In other words, buy “teaching jobs”, and target a campaign to Vancouver. Have as your landing page your Vancouver Teaching Jobs. All of a sudden, you start to build a perfect storm.
