Search Marketing Trainer

Okay, let's talk long tail for a second. First, the definition of long-tail keywords (as I see it) is (are?) keywords associated with your product, company or service that are not the brand identifiers. So, for example, a long-tail term for Coca Cola may be "thirst quenching beverage" while a top-of-mind brand identifier is "soda." If you just stuck with core brand identifiers, you'd likely have a very short list of keywords (unless you're a retail site selling lots of brands/products, or a deep-content site with many different categories to promote).

Long-tail keywords are often associated with people who are further along the purchase cycle than more generic, brand-oriented terms. A person searching for the term "digital camera" is likely much less likely to make a purchase than someone searching for "red nikon 10 megapixel digital camera."

You should definitely consider incorporating the long tail into your campaign as part of your long term strategy (LONG TERM being the operative words here). I say this because you can easily get bogged down into trying to guess every single keyword combination associated with your campaign. And, in fact, it's often a waste of time to even try.

I'm here to let you know a DEEP DARK SECRET about long tail terms that will hopefully free up your Saturday mornings.

Long-tail terms are generally low volume terms and thus Google may freeze them out of the auction completely.

A basic rule of "the long tail" is that they are lonnnnnng strings of terms that contain 3, 4 or more words. Because they are so specific, they tend to have a low volume of searches associated with them. But here's the kicker! Terms that get very little search volume on Google do not enter into the auction at all. So you can end up spending tons of time stemming out your keywords until you have thousands of long-tail terms, but chances are that Google won't be displaying most of these terms because the search volume on them is too low. Don't believe me? Read it from the horse's mouth: Keyword Status: Low Search Volume.

Google remains strangely silent about the use of long-tail keywords as part of your overall account strategy, but this thread in their Adwords help forum sheds some light on the subject. A Google employee responded to a question about low-volume terms having a negative impact on quality score:

"the only time advertisers can run into trouble is when they have a large number of low traffic volume keywords. The total sum of all those impressions can add up and start to drag down the account."

It seems pretty clear, based on this response, that Google is discouraging the overuse of low volume keywords and since "low volume" almost always applies to "long tail" this could mean that too many long-tail terms can (and probably does) hurt overall account quality score.