Using Long Tail Marketing Techniques in Search Engine Buys

As with all of your search engine marketing endevours, it is extremly important to track the results of your campaign. For my client's sites, I spend hours each month pouring through their log files to analyze each refferer and measure their ROI. For large campaigns this should be done at least weekly. Too often people spend time and money on search engine optimization but then do not spend the time necessary to really understand the results.

Here is an exaple. Let's say you have an printer ink supply business and have budgetted $1000 / month on bringing in traffic and hopefully sales to your business. The top search engine keywords to buy for this site in terms of searches is: ink jet printer, ink jet refill, epson ink jet cartridge, hp ink jet cartridge, cheap ink jet cartridge, epson ink jet , discount ink jet cartridge, ink jet printer review, best ink jet printer, ink jet printer refill. If you wanted to be #1 for each of these terms, you would spend $963.88 for a total of 519 clicks. This is $1.85 per click. Now if your site is really good and really targetted you can expect at most a 2% conversion on these clicks. 2% is actually really high, most websites have a conversion rate between .5% - 1.5%. We'll also figure that the average order is $40 and from that $40 you're making $15. So out of your 519 clicks, we've had 10 sales for a total of $400.00 and a net profit of $150.00. Spending $1000 a month to make $150.00 doesn't make a whole lot of sense, but you'd be surprised by the number of companies doing it.

Now let's take this same example but use the long tail technique of ad buys. For these ads we will purchase the actual model numbers of the OEM ink jet cartridges people are looking for as well as printer model numbers. To get the same amount of trafic we'll actually need to purchase hundreds of keyword phrases. Each one might only give us 2 or 3 clicks a month, but at the end of the month our hundreds of phrases have brought us the exact same 519 clicks, but this time at an average cost of 12 cents per click. Total amount spent on ads: $62.28.00 WooHoo, by analyzing our results and intelligently going after underutilized key word phrases, our advertising campaign has make actually managed to make a almost 2 1/2 times the amount of profit as our cost.