As pay per click advertising gets more competitive, and bids continue to rise, a new myth has grown in the internet marketing world: the myth of the long tail. The long tail is considered to be phrases that receive less traffic than general phrases. They are usually multiple words long and are more specific than general phrases. To attract small companies who want to keep their budgets small, pay per click advertising companies will talk about bidding on these more specific phrases to reduce costs and to reduce competition.

Although bidding on more specific phrases presents an opportunity to create ads specifically geared toward the user’s query and to land them on more relevant pages, the idea of there being an untouched long tail of search terms is blown out of proportion. This is because of pay per click’s matching options. Google Adwords explains its broad matching option:

“This is the default option. If you include general keyword or keyword phrases-such as tennis shoes-in your keyword list, your ads will appear when a user’s query contains tennis and shoes, in any order, and possibly along with other terms. Your ads will also automatically show for expanded matches, including plurals and relevant variations. Because broad matches are sometimes less targeted than exact or phrase matches, you should create keyword phrases containing at least two descriptive words each.”

Google also explains expanded matches:

With expanded matching, the Google AdWords system automatically runs your ads on highly relevant keywords, including synonyms, related phrases, and plurals, even if they aren’t in your keyword lists. For example, if you’re currently running ads on the keyword web hosting, expanded matching may identify the keyword website hosting for you.

Broad matching covers most of the “long tail.” If you are bidding on a more specific phrase that a general phrase is a subset of, your ads will probably show if you are broad matching the general phrase. In other words, if there are large companies in your market who are broad matching general phrases, you will still be competing with them in the bidding.

Although long tail queries generally get less ads showing for them because not every advertiser uses broad match or because the Adwords system might not expand the keyphrase being bid on to match that particular query, it’s important to consider that low traffic terms aren’t worth much if ads aren’t listed at the top. The lower the traffic a phrase receives the more important it is that an ad appears on top in order to generate any clicks at all. So even if there are less ads showing, the competition might be the same because your ad needs to show on top just to get any traffic.

It is also often not worth the time to bid on, manage, write separate ads, and create separate landing pages for terms that don’t receive much traffic. Spending hours specializing ads and pages for terms that generate a couple clicks a month won’t be worth the time.

What the Long Tail Concept is Useful For

There are terms that are in the long tail that are truly useful for pay per click and they have long been known of. Product model numbers, some Acronyms, and very specific product names/brands are a few examples. These types of phrases can sometimes still get top rankings for very low bids. It can often times be worth bidding on these terms if a site naturally accommodates them. But this is hardly the bread and butter of pay per click advertising.

Although the long tail may not be a particularly useful concept for pay per click advertising, it is for SEO. In search engine optimization it is important what specific phrase is being targeted. Targeting a longer phrase in a page’s html title and text reduces competition and makes it more likely to get ranked for that phrase.