An analysis of the importance of the long tail in search engine marketing

overview of SEM

search engine provider

Basically two streams of research on search engine marketing exist. One stream deals with the optimal design of keyword auctions and possible improvements

advertiser

Another research stream analyzes key questions from the advertisers’ perspective, including forecasts of the success of single keywords by modeling the relationships between bid and rank as well as rank and click-through rate

long-tail and search engine marketing

The implication of the potential importance of the long tail in search engine marketing is that the management of search engine marketing campaigns is rather cumbersome because advertisers need to administer many keywords and optimize their prices and texts.

propositions

We doubt that the long tail, based on the large number of rather less popular keywords, drives the success of search engine marketing campaigns. We therefore empirically analyze the following three propositions:
- Proposition 1 (the concentration proposition): The distribution of searches, clicks and conversions across keywords is concentrated.
- Proposition 2 (the increasing keywords proposition): An increase in the number of keywords has a rather small effect on the number of searches, clicks and conversions.
- Proposition 3 (the most popular keyword proposition): The use of the most popular keywords at one point in time is sufficient to capture the vast majority of searches, clicks and conversions in future periods.