Not So Long Tail
August of this year will mark the four year anniversary of Google going public, in many ways the tipping point for Internet advertising as we know it today. Four years ago, what existed? Internet life focused around portals, and the pay-per-click landscape looked like California in the 1940’s. Lead generation began to show massive scale, with mortgage and online education buying tremendous amounts of inventory, and companies like eBay and Amazon.com had become mainstays of our way of life. It was just about this time, too, that Chris Anderson, editor-in-chief of Wired Magazine began to put the pieces of the digital landscape together, culminating in his paradigm-shifting piece, The Long Tail. As he describes it, "In an era without the constraints of physical shelf space and other bottlenecks of distribution, narrowly-targeted goods and services can be as economically attractive as mainstream fare." His article, or more appropriately, these, became a best-selling book in 2006, and in the span of a few years has become a common place phrase for describing various strategies of Internet marketing. And, while it has become an almost indispensable concept for marketers, like so much of the web, namely Google’s AdWords system, Mr. Anderson had a different audience in mind initially, retailers. He illustrates an example with the retail music industry, saying, "Traditional retail economics dictate that stores only stock the likely hits, because shelf space is expensive. But online retailers (from Amazon to iTunes) can stock virtually everything, and the number of available niche products outnumber the hits by several orders of magnitude. Those millions of niches are the Long Tail, which had been largely neglected until recently in favor of the Short Head of hits."
Whether Chris Anderson had it in mind, the keyword landscape as he expanded upon his theory, search marketers jumped on the notion of the Long Tail. All of a sudden, marketers had a name for their activities when trolling for less competitive keywords – mining the Long Tail. In discussions, you would hear companies describe their core strategy and competency in terms of their ability to mine the tail, how compared to a company that might have a total of 10,000 keywords, they had hundreds of thousands if not millions. It has become such a part of the lexicon that Sue Decker, President of Yahoo, in describing the potential outsourcing of search to Google, mentioned how their now frienemy would monetize "long tail" keywords. Recently, though, the Long Tail hasn’t felt so long, especially for those spending sub-seven figures. Many miners of the Long Tail, have started to feel as though their gold rush days have an expiration date on them as they receive emails from the major engines, containing phrases like, "We have noticed widespread compliance/relevance issues for bidded keywords throughout account XXXXX," and, "This account will remain offline until ALL non-compliant keywords are removed." If you receive that last part, consider yourself lucky, as at least one engine has a history of taking action first and dispensing the explanation of the infraction later. Instances like these, which now contain a critical mass of advertiser, have forced us to dampen our once unflappable enthusiasm for the long tail in online marketing and start to think of it as something else, whether you agree with the concept or not – Run of Network. While the Long Tail does exist in search, i.e., the ability to aggregate some large number of keywords to drive more volume than the obvious "hits" (to borrow from the music world), we’d argue that it doesn’t exist equally and that those in the search space don’t want you on it.
The debate and challenge of Long Tail monetization centers around relevancy, as at the end of the day, relevancy propelled Google to the top spot of query volume in search and set them on this path of currently unstoppable momentum. Relevancy has become as broad and almost overused a word as authenticity has in other types of marketing. And similar to authenticity, relevancy has slightly different meanings depending on whom you ask. Should a diet ad for instance be allowed to advertise on a words like "women’s health journal" or what about "women’s fragrance health beauty?" If in favor you could argue that it not only has enough contextual relevance but also a behavioral relevancy as well. Those reading about health or interested in beauty products probably overlap with an audience interested in other beauty products such as weight loss. When it comes to relevancy though, probably the killer, and the majority of long tail marketers do not get the benefit of the doubt. They are held to a purely contextual standard that much like how the FTC judges infractions, uses a lowest common denominator approach, i.e. would someone not all that savvy think the two items relate to one another. In the beginning, the arrows favored the online marketers, but more and more, if not exclusively, they fall the way of the engine. And, when we say applied unfairly, it’s because the engines are still a business, and the biggest spenders will receive special treatment. The classic example comes from auction sites or comparison shopping sites, where it seems they have an ad for almost any keyword, and why shouldn’t they? Given that so many queries revolve around products, and they aggregate said products, they could have a result matching the user’s intent. Using the same algorithms for quality and even the human sniff test, their accounts contain a larger than normally accepted number of irrelevant keyword infractions. But, as we wrote about last week, the world revolves around relationships, and they have the right ones.
With respect to relevancy, the human language makes it tough. Retail and relevancy go together in a binary fashion. When searching Amazon or iTunes, either this song exists or it doesn’t; this name is a name of an artist or not. We carry it or we don’t. Transfer that to search, and all of a sudden you add extra dimensions, such as do alternate meanings exist for the same thing, and what likelihood does this particular query reference something in music or elsewhere. When those who mine the Long Tail start to work their magic, they take away some of the power of the engines, and in my opinion, relevancy has more and more to do with the internal levers that allow for monetization. There is a reason broad match exists, and it’s not really to help the advertiser. It’s to help the engine. Optimization works the same way. Companies want to show the right ad to the right person and the right time, but it’s all relative. The right often means the one that makes the company the most money. It just so happens that a relevant ad can also equal the most profitable one, and Long Tail miners end up being seen as the bad guy in this equation, as the more specific they are in trying to match ads with words, the less room the engine has to do it. That in itself is a fundamental shift. Once seen as savvy and a boon to the engines, the Long Tail marketer has become relegated to a non-value add player in the ecosystem, a run of network promoter, in a relevancy filled world. As we’ve said before though, it’s a slippery slope when one entity tries to control something relative, like relevancy. We’ve started down that slope already, and so far, it’s the marketers that have paid the price.
