The Tale Behind the Tail

Principles and Strategies for Managing the Long Tail

The long tail, a concept first popularized by Chris Anderson in a 2004 article in Wired magazine, is a concept that refers to businesses in which many low volume items cumulatively account for a large portion of revenue. When applied to SEM, this concept describes the way consumers search for products and services. In a typical campaign, 80% of overall search volume is dominated by 100 or less generic high frequency queries and the remaining 20% of volume comes from unique and highly specific low frequency queries. A savvy search marketer leverages this information when building out his or her campaign. The smart marketer bids on high frequency queries such as “cheap flights” but also bids on thousands and sometimes millions of queries such as “cheap flights to Estonia” that are rare but highly targeted.

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