Jan. 25th, 2007

Long Tail Pay Per Click-Remember where you heard it first.

Could there be a Long Tail effect in Search Engine Pay Per Click. If there is we will be liberally throwing the term "LT PPC"  around in meetings very soon. Now that can’t be a good thing.

Still, fellow Bloggist Scott Goodyear‘s seems to think that bidding on hundreds (nay thousands?) of uncompetitive keywords in search engines could  keep costs down where they belong.  As he explains:

"Like early importers and exporters, if you can find many small under served niches, you can often bolster sales, sign-ups, lead conversions, etc. while your competitors go after the obvious, the more general, often most competitive of keywords and markets."

I wonder if this is true. Now we do a bit of search engine work here at Mortar. Branding – DR  – PR its all the same to us agnostics.

But we are reminded of the criticism that Chris Anderson’s Long Tail theory simply isn’t proven here. Rarely (if ever) have a slew of misses (no matter over how long a period) made up for the smash-hit success of a blockbuster movie.

Anderson is essentially arguing that time upends the honored Pareto principle. Pareto’s rule reminds us that some 80% of sales will come from around 20% of clients. Purists click here for Wikipedia’s version.

Plus an advertiser would need to devote time to researching, developing and managing their long list of long tail keywords before a full analysis could be complete.

Nevertheless, we will embark on finding the Truth. Stay tuned.

p.s. Long Tail author Chris A. spoke at our client GGU last year. You can still catch the webcast here.

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