PPC Keywords: Long Tail or Tall Neck? Fat Torso!

Ralph Wilson's newsletter today brought a new term to the in the long tail discussion. I thought Tall neck was a cool addition - but now we have the "torso" (which I from now on choose to call the "Fat Torso").

The principles are perfectly sound - it describes where the real value keywords are for PPC campaigns:

It's not the tall neck, where all of the generic, one word, high traffic, sometimes very high priced keywords are. Those keywords are typically reserved for those with more money than brains.

It's also not necessarily the long tail, where you'll find thousands of three and four word highly targeted but infrequently searched words. These are great - don't get me wrong! It's just that on many of the phrases the trickle of traffic may not be worth the trouble.

It's the Fat Torso! The part in the middle with typically two word phrases that have a decent amount of traffic, a reasonable cost, and good targeting. Andrews suggestion is that most people don't spend enough time making the torso as fat as possible. He pushes us to think of all of the variations of your possible words. Have you really got them all???

All good (or at least great) PPC managers will know this, and revisit the list frequently to make sure, but Andrew Goodman just named it. Congratulations on coining a new term, Andrew.

The full article is here:
http://www.wilsonweb.com/paid-search/goodman-torso.htm

And wasn't I pleased to see that Andrew is from my very own city of Toronto, Canada!

Hey Andrew - if you are looking at your link reports or referring sites and come across this post, please drop me a line.

The Long Neck vs. The Long Tail

Sounds kind of like a research paper on evolution of a certain kind of pre-historic mammal, but it's not. It's a discussion on targeting web sites to a specific audience.

We've heard so much lately about the "long tail" - the long list of occasionally searched unique keyword phrases for every topic that follows a short list of frequently typed phrases.

Search engine optimizers and Pay Per Click marketing specialists like myself are quite interested in the long tail because there is so much value to be had there. For PPC the long tail is important because bidding on a huge list of less frequently searched phrases brings lower costs and better value for advertising dollars. For SEO the long tail is important because optimizing for these phrases is easier and more likely to succeed than optimizing for the most competitive phrases.

Well, Gerry McGovern, in his infinite wisdom, just coined a new one (as far as I know) with the "long neck"- and it is equally if not more important for the Internet marketer.

Check it out here: http://www.gerrymcgovern.com/nt/2006/nt-2006-08-14-long-neck.htm#cc