Before we get started let me define what a long tail keyword is. A long tail keywords is a highly specific keyword containing 4 words or more.
Here’s an example :
buy nike tennis shoes size 10
discount nike running sneakers
red leather high heeled shoes
As you can imagine someone typing in a keywords like : “buy nike tennis shoes size 10″ is READY TO BUY! In other words an effective long tail keywords will have a very high conversion rate.
But here’s the thing, a 4+ word keyword will not get a lot of traffic, maybe 1-2 clicks a month. So the trick is to bid on 30k,50k, even a 100k long tails. You can do the math, the traffic will add up.
These keywords have very little to no competition so you’ll get a very low cost per click. Heck, with a strong list of long tails you can launch a very effective direct linking campaign, and completely clean up.
Sounds pretty simple right?
Well I hate to burst your bubble, but coming up with huge ‘smart’ list of long tails (like the examples above) that actually get traffic is NOT easy :
- Sure you could crack open KeywordDiscovery and Wordtracker, but you’ll be disappointed with what you get back. They’re typically not the type of quality long tails that will generate massive amounts of traffic and high conversion rates. Plus everyone else in your market has access to these keywords.
- The other thing is that the long tail strategy really doesn’t work well in every niche. Niches like retail, travel, insurance, that have massive amounts of search volume, and people are often looking for something very specific, will work well with the long tail strategy.
- You could make a huge multiplier of terms related to your niche and generate 100k long tail keywords. However, unless you really understand your niche chances are you’ll get a huge list of junk keywords that don’t get any traffic.
- The long tails for different niches, say retail vs travel, will be very different, so that just one more layer of complexity added in!
So is it worth cracking the long tail strategy for ppc affiliate marketing. Are there really affiliates out there making a fortune bidding on 100k+ long tail keywords?
Every heard of Clicks2Customers (C2C)? They’re the biggest super affiliate company in the world, started by renowned PPC expert, Vinny Lingham. Clicks2Customers (which has now become more of a performance-based agency), specializes in the travel and retail markets with a direct to merchant long tail strategy.
When I mean long tail, I mean REALLY long tail. C2C bids on several million long tail keywords per merchant. And you thought managing your 10k keyword campaign was intimidating!?!
C2C brings tens of millions of dollars in affiliate commissions every year.
So I wouldn’t say long tails are the holy grail of search so much as developing a killer system for generating quality high converting long tails, now that’s THE Holy Grail of Search.
This is a research project I’ve started with a fellow super affiliate. We have some very good ideas, but we still need to test them.
clicks2customers direct to merchant long tail keywords vinny lingham
Wow, I’m surprised to be honest. In my niches, 80% of sales are made by top 15-ish keywords I bid on.
Amit said:
That’s actually not necessarily the case, if you bid on broad and/or phrase you WILL NOT show up for every broad and phrase possible term, only ones that Google deems “relevant”.
Patrick said:
Are you serious?! Wow I didn’t know that. I figured as much for broad match, but not phrase match too. I always thought if you bid on “nike tennis shoes” phrase match your ad would be eligible to show for EVERY search phrase that contains that term.
Well that makes a lot more sense to me if that’s the case. Thanks for the info, learn something new every day!
One of the biggest problems is maintaining QS with long tail keywords.
For example, if your landing page does not have the phrase “discount coupon”, you will very likely get a poor QS for “Nike Tennins Shoes Discount Coupon” although your landing page may have all the information about Nike Tennis Shoes. This happens to me all the time. The good thing is that if there is no competition on that keyword your CPC is still low despite of Poor QS
What about 50k keyword limit?
Or are you suggesting having one campaign per account?
I thought google allowed only one acct
Hey Amit,
Hi There, Amit as u said to do direct linking with such out-of-the bos long-tails.
Amit, do u really think that googlw will not penalise on QS? Coz for sure ur KW will not b on the Landing Page.
Amit then how to overcome this?
My idea is to make a simple landing page with a Poll then to direct visitor to merchant’s site.
But Amit if i could do direct Linking then nothing beats it. So what do u haev to say about the QS then?
Regards
Raj Mehta
Mumbai
Some of my best sites have revolved entirely around long-tailed keywords. I would definitely say, yes, they are worth it.
Ya, that is the problem I am having too. I am blocked by the limitations of Adwords. They have keyword limits and Ad group limits, so it would be pretty hard to have a custom ad per keyword which would be best for longtail. Any suggestions?
I am doing the “go two weeks and use high CTRs to get a great QS” stage right now.
For me when ever I venture into even the 50 Plus KWs range I get slapped by Google.
Even with a 4% CTR plus avgs I get slapped.
I think what we do is always relative to how well others do in a niche. I can get 60% CTRS and if other get 75% I will get slapped at some point. I hope I am wrong.
I feel the Mighty G culls every once in a while for the higher CTR’s. lower maintenance costs.
Don’t get me wrong I love this topic; I know yourguys know much more than I ever will.
PS
what software does the epc avegage and bidding adjustments for someone?
The “bid high to get a high CTR and QS” strategy hasn’t worked for a long time. Everything you do IS compared to averages. So even if you are in the #1 spot, if your CTR is 5% and the average CTR for the #1 spot is 7%, you’re still not going to “build up your QS”. It really doesn’t matter what position you start at, because everything you do is compared to other advertisers and their results.
As far as keyword and adgroup limits, just use the AdWords My Client Center – you can setup as many accounts as you want and manage them all from the MCC (even programatically using their API if you REALLY want to get fancy)
I still don’t understand how you can set up millions of long-tail keywords and get by the 50k keyword/account limit. Of course you could do that by starting zillions of adwords accounts, but that would be frustrating to manage (and you’d probably incur the big G’s wrath at some point and find yourself out of business overnight after alot of work setting them up…)
I’m going to hazard a guess that C2C has a special relationship with Google which allows them to sidestep the limitations on mere mortals. I know they had raised millions of dollars from VCs recently and opened an office in Silicon Valley. They had stated in the press release that a big motivation for doing so was to strengthen their relationship with their search partners (Google, Yahoo!).