We have an on-going struggle with Yahoo! Search Marketing – nothing too clever, we’re just trying to get some adverts listed. I shan’t bore you with the full story. We’ve just had our latest rejection which has revealed yet another element of the company’s short-sightedness and shakey grasp on the reality of search.
It turns out that Yahoo! Search Marketing doesn’t let you advertise on keywords and phrases that don’t get enough searches. How many is not enough? 1 or 2 searches a month. They’ve obviously never heard of the long tail.
Why would they care if we’re trying to advertise on terms that people rarely search for? Does it create any additional load or overhead on their system? I’d hope not – unless the whole thing’s running on a couple of Vic 20s in someone’s back room.
I think the real reason that they won’t do it is because they’re still in the relative dark ages of employing legions of editorial staff who are busy approving listings (get this) by hand. A fantastically non-scalable solution which is going to cut them totally out of the long tail of search.
Of 670 listings we submitted, 166 were deemed to be unfit for listing due to low search volume. The point of the long tail is that is makes it economical to go uber-niche in digital marketing and delivery.
Somebody buy them the book for Christmas.
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
The lower limit set on the monthly search volume for ads does happen to be one of the major pitfalls of PPC but it doesn’t mean that the long tail can’t be targeted, just not as immediate and through natural search and good SEO. A good place to start looking for long tail searches that might inspire an article or blog post are your referal logs and you may even go one step further and use a long tail search tool!
That’s a great tip, thanks Jenna.