Everyone always says focus on long-tail keywords for Pay Per Click advertising. How is this helpful? For example, say I place an ad with the long-tail keyword specific match on "payday loans in temple,ky". My competitor is bidding on a broad match of "payday loans", so his ads show for every search containing the text "payday loans" including for searches for my long-tail keyword. How to long-tail keywords result in less competition/lower CPC?
Three things to look at here, relevance of your keyword to the users search result, the closer you are the more relevance Google will associate to your keyword. Secondly conversions, if I am looking for a new car I may type in "Second hand BMW's" when I deside which car I would like I may search again looking for "second hand BMW 325i" the braod match has appeared twice and could have payed for two clicks. This ties into the third point Relevance of the advert, because you are using long tail keywords you will be able to incorporate more relevance into your adverts. Hopw this helps
Your competitor - the dickhead that bids on payday loans (broad match) - will pay a very high cost per every click, as the Adwords system will see his keyword and ad as being irrelevant to most queries. What's more, he will have a very low CTR as a result of his ad being untargeted, which will increase his CPC further. Adwords is all about being as relevant as possible. Grasp that before it's too late. Say both of your ads appear for the query payday loans in temple, ky, and your ad reads "Payday Loans in Temple, KY" while his reads "Payday Loans", which do you think is most likely to get the click? Be as relevant as possible, dude. And only bid on very targeted longtails, making sure to include them in your headlines and ad texts.
This is questionable and also taken out of context and then also not understood by many. Long tail is any variation of a root keyword. Root keyword is the simplest form a keyword thats targeted. insurance = untargeted root keyword auto insurance = simplest form of a keyword thats targeted 96 honda civic auto insurance quote = long tail auto insurance quote = also considered long tail Now that you understand keyword variations lets examine your statement Why? Because insurance means to many things and 96 honda civic auto insurance quote is highly targeted and you know the conversion is going to be much higher. So how is it taken out of context? Since many guru's will advise that you should "focus" on long tail, they fail to explain exactly what that means. It means having a mix of root and long tail keywords within your campaign. You should be attempting to exact match every query mapped to your account because this will give you the greatest cost and positional control over your campaign. This results in thousands of keyword variations of sometime unmanageable proportions. So does that mean don't bid on auto insurance? NO... absolutely not... It means you need to utilize the root keyword properly within your campaign. Exact match the keyword in its own adgroup for isolation and control. Then place proper keyword tracking on the broad version to extract long tail variations and possible negative keyword terms. Then eventually you will have 1 root keyword "auto insurance" and a few thousand long tail variations of "auto insurance"
Great response, Priolo! However, with respect, I wouldn't bid on such untargeted broad matches as auto insurance. You're absolutely right in that roots should be used to extract targeted longtails. However, the roots that I would use would themselves be longtails, albeit short ones, and many of them, all already targeted. Bidding on the broad matches payday loan or auto insurance for purposes of extracting longtails would cost a bucket. Plus, many of the longtails that you might extract will be highly irrelevant and therefore a waste of time and cash. This can be avoided by using longer and thus more targeted roots.
Perhaps you are correct, but there are people and companies with budgets large enough to play in the root keyword markets. For those with smaller budgets, setting a more targeted root keyword may be advisable
or in a market with few competitors... i have a client that is in this enviable position. he thinks i'm a god!!