Long tail advertising and keywords is one of my favorite things to write about and study. The more detailed the keyword you get, the more targeted your audience and likely you are to find success with an ad campaign. What’s important to know is that you don’t even have to add multiple keywords to get more targeted and direct, sometimes it only takes one extra keyword.
In this example we are going to compare the differences between “tshirts” and “funny tshirts“. It may not seem like a huge difference, but for online search marketers it means the world.
Before looking at the search results, lets first take a look at the comparison in search stats between the two phrases.
Right away you will have noticed that “tshirts” has over 50 times the amount of search volume and almost double the advertiser cost. It’s also important to note that the competition is HIGH for both keywords.
Now lets take a look at how they compare in the search results.
“Tshirts” is an extremely generic keyword to go after, but you will notice that the page is completely filled with advertisers. More importantly, the advertisers in the yellow section are paying the most money to have this premium placement. It’s no wonder that these are mega huge companies will millions of dollars to spend on their branding and bringing in new customers. (Look at how generic the CustomInk and Amazon ads are… really no call to action)
Now let’s switch things up a little bit and look at “funny tshirts”.
In the screen capture below you will notice that everything has changed in terms of advertisers and ad spend.
Nearly all of the advertisers for “funny tshirts” are in the business of selling entertainment related tshirts and are much smaller in size compared to the advertisers for “tshirts”. Also notice how the top ad does an excellent job in providing a discount related call to action. You also have a wide selection of advertisers like badideashirts and 6dollarshirts being able to target their audience and compete on the right side bar of ads as well.
It’s not brain surgery, but it’s definitely cool and useful to break down the process of keyword bidding and advertisers.
So what can we learn from this?
- Just the addition of one keyword can make a huge difference in targeting your audience and changing your ad costs and advertiser competition.
- You don’t need to have a massive budget to compete in a high competition niche. (.60-80 cpc isn’t horrible)
- Know what your audience is looking for… “tshirts” vs. “funny tshirts” is a huge difference.
Though it might seem like a lot of online marketers and affiliates are focusing their efforts on social marketing and mobile advertising, pay per click marketing is still one of the strongest and most effective ways to drive a lot of volume and quality leads.
An easy way to blow through a lot of money is to create an ad campaign and not be patient. By this I mean you want to have as much information and stats as soon as possible. This is the wrong way to run ad campaigns. Instead, you need to focus on scaling out your campaigns at a very slow pace in the beginning and allow your campaign to grow and the data to trickle in. If you have a $500 budget, don’t run the campaign until the funds run out… instead, you need to set a lot daily limit, such as $10 or $25 a day. This way you can look at the data (traffic and leads) that have come in and see if you are anywhere near profitable. This allows you to tweak and 
In the world of online marketing it’s easy to build up costs fast. From annual domain renewals, monthly hosting, software and tracking subscriptions and media buys… you can be spending money all over the place. It’s very important to make sure that you keep track of all of your spending and how much money is going where each month. It’s easy to start the month a few hundred or thousand dollars in debt just from these built in costs.
In the previous point I talked about keeping track of your monthly costs. It’s not only important to look at the monthly spending habits of your business, but also plan for the months and years ahead. We can use domains and hosting for example. Many of us like to buy domain names right when we think we have a good idea… then these domains end up sitting in our accounts and we waste a ton of money over the years. I have several hundred domains in my accounts, and with a $10 a year renewal fee, this adds up to several thousands of dollars a year in costs. This is a perfect example of knowing your costs before they come into place.
