The concept of the “long tail” has, until recently, been essential to running PPC campaigns in the most ROI efficient way possible but if Google continue this policy of “chopping off the tail” what approach do I have to take now?.
The idea is that there is money to be made in selling lots of different widgets that you might only sell 1/week, 1/month or even 1/year of. If most stores only bother with widgets that sell 1000/day, there's good money to be made in "mining the long tail", as most stores prefer not to bother with these items. Any time you have a market that is ignored by most stores, there's opportunity.
The problem with Adwords and the long tail is that for whatever reason, (my pet theory is poor choices at the core of the Adwords architecture) Google seems to prefer that customers minimize their quantity keywords and ads. And forget about keywords that might be triggered, say, 1/week.
Either Google doesn't "get it" about the long tail, or else they have no clue how to implement a system that can take advantage of it.
It's possible that current technology and hardware makes it impossible. But I doubt it.
Just one example of the inappropriate choices that Google has made: forcing advertisers to exhaustively list keyword phrases in an absurdly simplistic manner, when a syntax could be used that could in many cases express in a single line what currently takes hundreds or even thousands of keyword phrases.
Example: why do we have to list:
blue widget
blue widgets
red widget
red widgets
green widget
green widgets
when this could so much more easily be expressed using a syntax such as:
(blue ¦ red ¦ green) widget[s]
Of course, this is just a user (advertiser) interface issue. But I'd bet Google's made equally dumb choices internally.
It's also a good example of Google's arrogance and leading us around on a chain. Instead of inventing a useful syntax for expressing alternatives and optional parts in keyword phrases, they have thousands of us monkeys typing-away like crazy, needlessly.
Taking the devil's advocate position for a moment, I do note that nobody else has implemented a good keyword syntax, either. ALL the Emperors are cavorting naked...
Amazon = loooooong tail!
