Tech Mentat

Since launching my career in search marketing, I have been lucky enough to work with companies that are metric-centric, obsessed with analyzing user behavior/trends and roi sensitive. While this, at times, is pain (everyone wants that day or two in the office when they can daydream) overall it pushes one to work harder and dig deeper into what converts and why. In the case of pay per click marketing, this lends itself to The Long Tail.

I don’t want to spend time talking about “what is the long tail” as I think there are plenty of search marketing professionals who have written eloquently on this subject and its benefits (including Chris Anderson who coined the phrase). What I do want to focus on is the question I have been asking myself over the past few months as I watch/analyze trends on the acquisition and conversion of users to Healthline.com. The question is “What is the Long Term Prospect of The Long Tail?” - a question that is the result of two other thoughts that have popped into my mind: “What is the effect of AdWords impression based minimum CPC requirement?” and “What is the effect of AdWords quality score for a complex taxonomy?”

What is the effect of AdWords impression based minimum CPC requirement?

Back into 2001-2002, AdWords allowed you sit keywords in your account that received little-to-no volume without penalty. A keyword that had less than ten searches a month and obtained only a few visitors a quarter was allowed to flourish. For Radiator.com (who I worked for at the time), this was a great opportunity to gain HIGHLY converting users to their site at barely any cost (aka the definition of long tail marketing); a search for your-small-town honda accord raidiator 92 (location AND mispelling) was gold. It was great information for our organic marketing at the time as well; back when you could have a single page dynamic swap keywords and it wasn’t considered duplicate content. Yum!

However, over the course of the past year+ (specifically over the past 4-6 months) I have been noticing many of these keywords turning INACTIVE. At first this change didn’t bother me one bit as AdWords was essentially cleaning up the clutter for me – there MANY keywords that received no volume whatsoever and were merely causing the UI, reporting or bulk API changes to suck time and life out of me. When I spoke to my rep at the time, I was informed that the system was merely “cleaning up.” Ok. Fine. But the system progressed and about 6 months ago I found myself on the phone with my rep looking at data and asking the question “why is your system killing keywords that get 5 searches a day?” For the long tail, 5 searches is (I think) a lot! The two explanations I received (and have subsequently received) is that either a) the keyword is highly competitive so the system places your keyword on INACTIVE to force a higher bid (more exposure and searches) or b) your keyword doesn’t receive enough searches. Dear God.

There is a lot of speculation that can be derived from this movement in the AdWords system; namely that Google is artificially skewing the marketplace value for given terms but what I am concerned with is its obvious effects on The Long Tail. Visually The Long Tail is represented by a graph that, visually, has a beginning and end – however, theoretically, The Long Tail is like pie (the mathematical notation, not the food) and seemingly has no end. My career as a paid search marketer as thrived in this never ending tail and it’s conversion/roi ; by the AdWords system making judgments such as described above, they are placing a finite end to the tail. This a direct attack on long tail marketing as well as my success to drive quality, converting traffic to my employers destination domain.

What is the effect of AdWords quality score for a complex taxonomy?

Google knows all, right? Well, not really – they know a lot but if coop has shown us anything it’s that Google has a lot to learn (from us). Since the first quality score update, there has been a lot of hooting & hollering about the decisions that Google is making on what is “quality” – both from a conversion stand point and a content standpoint.

I have yet to be hurt by the conversion factor (cross fingers, knock on wood, drink heavily) but I have been slaughtered on the content end. Let me quickly state that AdWords loves our landing pages for head terms; users may disagree but AdWords (by and large) gives us a GREAT quality score… at least that’s the rating that shows up in the UI.

This score doesn’t just hold true for head terms but many (obvious) tail terms; we may have a great score for lupus as well as lupus symptoms diabetes. Where the quality scoring system starts to break down is when Healthline’s medical taxonomy out smarts AdWords. For instance, because our sole focus is on health information and we have teams of doctors working day and night to improve our taxonomy, we know that clubfoot is the same as congenital talipes equinovarus. But since Google isn’t sure of this connection, they don’t see sending a user to our clubfoot page as a relevant (or quality) experience. As a result this keyword gets a poor quality score (despite the fact that it has a high CTR & great conversion for us), is placed on INACTIVE and eventually hits a minimum CPC that we cannot not pay.

These two points hurt Healthline (and my successes) and I know that we are not alone. But less than the immediate pain of being pinched on The Long Tail strategy; I can’t help take this two points and ask “What is the Long Term Prospect of The Long Tail?”

What is the Long Term Prospect of The Long Tail?

Clearly, to have a definite opinion one way or another on this question (at this point) would be mere speculation but my initial feeling is that Google is looking to isolate The Long Tail in order to secure annual price (CPC) increases. Essentially, they are looking to put everyone who uses pay per click marketing on the same playing field; you can be smart (with your long tail campaigns) but only as smart as it is marginally profitable for AdWords. Again, this is just speculation.

The flip side is that there is a temporary gap right now where individual company’s understand Google’s marketplace better than Google does - a gap that will soon be solve through a better understand of different industry’s taxonomies. Once their semantic relationships between (what could be considered) widely varying concepts become more complex, they will feed this information into their page quality score algorithm.

In either case, I do think that The Long Tail (for pay per click) is and will be marginalized to some degree.