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Long Tail Keywords vs Quality Score

Use of long Tail keywords in your Ad Groups will improve conversion and relevancy for your Ads. First of all you have to understand that Quality Score is measured separately for your Ad Group, Keywords, Ads, Network (Display and Search), Landing page and Account. The score is calculated on the fly when a user enters a search query. With long-tail keywords the volume of searches would be low. 

Here are 3 Best Practices while using long-tail keywords in your Account:

1) Mix it Up: Although using Long-Tail keywords would improve relevancy and conversion for your Ads, there is a reason why the keywords are termed long-tail. They are rare and the aggregate volume of the long-tail keywords would still be low. A better strategy would be to target mid-tail keywords along with long-tail keywords. Although the price for mid-term keywords would be high, pick keywords that get high search volume. Now change the match type to exact to improve relevancy. Now you have an Ad Group that has a healthy mix of long-tail and mid-tail keywords. This practice will improve the Quality Score for your keyword and Ads.

2) Ignore the Display Network: When you have a low budget, every click matters. You can’t afford to get non-targeted visitors from Display network. Even if you have carefully picked placements, visitors from Search Network are keen on completing an action while visitors in display network are influenced by the content of the publisher. If the context of the content is different from the intent of the keyword that you have picked, the visits will be useless. Focus completely on the search network.

3) Ad Group Performance: This is the most important metric. 

Campaign ->> Ad Groups --> Keywords --> Ads

When you are measuring performance for your long-tail keywords, measure the aggregate click through rate in your Ad Group. It is a matter of debate on what an average click through rate is. But in general less than 0.05% is a low CTR. Once your keywords receive over 1000 impressions and you are getting less than .01% CTR, it is time to remove the keywords from the Ad Group. Move it to a more relevant Ad Group or remove it completely.

4) Long-tail Keywords are Time Consuming: Imagine how difficult would it be to group long-tail keywords to Ad Groups. Although the intent would be much clearer with long-tail keywords, it is extremely difficult to create clickable Ads for each Ad group. Long-tail keywords are generated every day with millions of new keywords entering the Adwords system. If you run a report in your analytics or internal search, you will realize the number of new long-tail keywords that led to visits to your website. To plan on an ever changing long-tail keywords, especially when every click cost you dollars is tedious. Start with 1000s of long-tail keywords and create test Ad Groups. After you have found the best converting keywords, add them to your permanent Ad Groups. Remove the rest of them. Now create small variations of the best performing long-tail keywords. Monitor and refine your long-tail keyword list.

If you want expert help in Structuring your PPC Account, contact us or you can call us at: India (Ph): +91 9497189032, UK (Ph): +44 (0)20-3371-9976 or US (Ph): +1 650-491-0004

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