The Long Tail of Google AdWords and finally, the solution.
Before I even talk about the solution, I’ll fill you in on the problem: It’s hard accurately managing the long tail keywords within a Google Adwords campaign. First, you have to find the weird, out there, way too specific keywords that people use to find your website. There can be thousands of them. From there, you have to accurately group them into categories, because you are trying to create text ads that are relevant to the keywords you’ve grouped. Why do this? Because Google looks at the commonality between keywords, text ads, and landing pages (where you go when you click on the text ads). If all three don’t jive really well, your Quality Score goes down, increasing your cost per click and decreasing your ranking relative to the rest of the sponsored ads. So, by now, you should understand that a good Quality Score decreases your costs and increases your chances of your ad showing at the top of the list.
Understanding that is great, but it’s difficult to get thousands of keywords into specific groups using the AdWords interface and still hard to do it well with other programs, like AdWords Editor. In addition, once you get your keywords into these nice groups, they’re static. It’s a fairly well known fact that if you leave your AdWords campaign alone, nothing much will change. Roughly the same number of people will come to your site each month. To update these groups is a word-tracking pain in the ass, and most marketers don’t have the time to devote so much effort to a single online campaign with everything else going on.
So, lots of problems without an easy solution in sight, and my last resort would be to hire an internet search marketing consultant. I am friends with some of these guys and they’re great, but they’re the exception. I have come to dislike most online consultants for their snotty tone and know-it-all mentality that seems to flow naturally for them. I think that they talk to too many uninformed people and it goes to their heads… Moving along: I found the solution, and it didn’t involve blackmailing an online consultant.
Wordstream is a new tool that isn’t even out yet. It’s out! I was testing it along with a bunch of other companies across the country right now. It solves all of the problems that I outlined earlier. Here’s a couple highlights:
- The interface is online – no software to download
- Graphically view the long tail of your keywords and easily segment them into parent-child groups. See in one look which categories are too broad. Target them easily for further sub-categorization.
- The COOLEST PART: Install the tracking Javascript on your website (just like the AdWords one) and automatically update your keywords with any new searches that bring people to your site. This tracker grabs all searches, not just paid ones. It doesn’t simply update your main keyword list, it places every single new keyword into the appropriate keyword group you made, and then uploads it to Google. Is that not the coolest thing ever? Your AdWords campaigns are suddenly dynamic and up to date with the latest, longest part of the long tail of your keywords.
- Once you segment your keywords, Wordstream automatically prefills the text ad space, reminding you what the important keywords are for the particular group you’re working with.
So that’s not everything—this tool offers a lot more and I’ve only been using for a couple of weeks.
http://www.wordstream.com/
