The Relationship between Search Term Length and Conversion
The relationship between Search Term Length and Conversion rate has been discussed by many, for example, Long-tail Campaign Performance Study, Long-Tail Keywords: A Better Way to Connect with Customers, and Are Long-Tail Keyword Phrases Good for My Business?. And they agree that longer-tail keywords have higher conversion rate. Here is a simple chart that illustrates the relationship between long-tail keywords and conversion rate (CVR) showing that, as the keyword phrase length increases, the search volume for each keyword decreases, but the conversion rate increases. Simply put, the Longer the search term is, the better the conversion. For example, when a shopper is searching for a “jimmy choo women’s black leather jacket” and then actually lands on a page showing exactly those items, the conversion rate is better than a shopper that searches for “leather jacket”. Of course, this happens only if the following conditions are met:- The paid search campaign has enough keywords to capture long-tail intent (exact and broad match)
- The site has content that is relevant to the intent expressed by the provided keywords.
- The website has a deep linking ability to point to the webpage with the relevant content for the specified long-tail keyword.
- The campaign bidding does not favor head keywords, so that the long-tail keywords will get the impressions and have the same average position as head keywords.
When these conditions met, there are real long-tail campaign performance improvements
Although many articles and blogs hint at performance improvements, we wanted to quantify the impact. Taking data from real search ad campaigns, the table below clearly shows the major impact of long-tail keywords. And the result is that conversion rate increase of +32% for the keywords that contained size or color information compared to those that did not. Since 20% of the campaign clicks were on this specific set of long-tail keywords, performance of the entire campaign really improved.Keyword | #Keywords | Clicks | Orders | Conversion Rate |
Long-Tail Improvement
|
Keywords (No Size/Color) | 34,833 | 64,997 | 1,112 | 1.71% | |
Longtail Keywords (include size/color) | 14,591 | 15,778 | 356 | 2.26% | +32% |
The “Head Heavy” Campaign
In reality though, we often see “Head Heavy” campaigns. This is a campaign that looks like this:Head Heavy Campaign | |||
Clicks | Average CVR | Conversions | |
Head Keywords | 22,500 | 1.67% | 375 |
Long-Tail Keywords | 8,845 | 2.98% | 264 |
Overall Performance | 31,345 | 2.04% | 639 |
20.9% Improvement for Balanced Campaign
20.9% Improvement for Balanced Campaign
Balanced Campaign | |||
Clicks | Average CVR | Conversions | |
Head Keywords | 12,375 | 1.67% | 206 |
Long-Tail Keywords | 18,970 | 2.98% | 566 |
Overall Performance | 31,345 | 2.46% | 772 |
A “Balanced” campaign is a campaign where most of the clicks go to long-tail keywords.
Why aren’t we seeing more “Balanced” campaigns?
There are many reasons for that. Assuming that the account is diligently maintained, constantly monitored and updated by skilled marketing team, the main issue is the size of the long-tail keyword set and the constant need to the update landing page destination URLs. The long-tail campaign size problem is simple — as the number of words in a keyword increase, the result is that the number of longer-tail keywords grows exponentially. Here is illustration with some typical numbers:Number of Words in a Keyword | Number of Keywords in Campaign | Relevant Landing Page Destinations |
1 | 20 | 10 |
2 | 340 | 113 |
3 | 5,100 | 1,133 |
4 | 61,200 | 9,067 |
5 | 428,400 | 42,311 |
6 | 2,142,000 | 141,037 |
7 | 8,568,000 | 376,099 |
8 | 29,988,000 | 877,564 |
The Long Tail campaign Dilemma: How to improve long-tail campaign performance without consuming large time updating thousands of landing page destinations