Tracking the long tail

This is a really long post, but I think it will be worth it!

I think I actually did a similar posting about a year ago, but there are a lot of new members, so I’m anxious to get everyone’s opinion. Also, this is something I still have a lot of difficulty with.

Like most affiliate marketers, I make use of a lot of long tail keywords, but the problem I have is doing ROI on long tail keywords. The great thing about these keywords is they don’t have a lot of competition, but one of the bad things is since they don’t have a high search volume, and don’t get a lot of clicks, there usually isn’t enough click/conversion data available to make a decision about a word’s worth.

The technique I usually use for keyword ROI is at the beginning of the month, I do keyword ROI for the previous month. I look at all my keywords that received more than 10 clicks and if the keyword made money, I either keep the bid the same, or I bid it a little higher to see how it performs at a higher position. If it lost me money, then I bid it $.01 below the average CPC for the month; a technique I learned from Jeremy in a Webinar he gave when I was first getting started. Most of my keywords fall into this category, although I do have a few words that cost me $50 to $100 a day and I try to do daily or weekly ROI reports for those words.

This technique has worked well for me and has allowed me to develop some very optimized campaigns, but as you can see, my technique doesn’t really allow me to track the long tail keywords, and when you have 10,000 long tail keywords in your campaign, this can be a HUGE problem. Low volume keywords in high volume can equal high volume clicks and if you can’t track this information, then it’s pretty much the same as bidding on a high volume keyword and not being able to track it. I’ve even tried looking at keywords over a 3 month period, but if it’s a low volume keyword, it might not get 10 clicks a year. Even if I can get enough info in 3 months, do you really want to lose money for 3 months before you know if a word is good?

The easy solution is probably to just delete any keyword that doesn’t get at least 10 clicks a month, but I could be throwing away a lot of money if I do that. I guess if I can’t find a way to track the long tail keywords, then that might make the most sense, because I’m probably losing more than I’m making on the words right now.

Another technique I’m considering is next time I’m doing a monthly ROI report, I can move all the keywords in an ad group that received less than 10 clicks into their own ad group. Then I can pause that ad group and see if I see a big change in my profits either way. If I see an increase, then I can keep the keywords paused and if I see a drop, I can start the keywords back and try some additional testing. This is a lot less permanent than deleting them.

I’m anxious to hear from everyone and thanks in advance for any help you can give.

James