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Comment by diziet | Hacker News Reader

This is a start, but the underlying data is something like $200k of SEM spend across what looks like a couple of campaigns. How confident are you that this is not specific to the campaigns/industry/clients/etc?

Also, Wesley, the scrolling on the site seems to be broken/hijacked.

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His results are very general. They depend only only on the fact that keywords with more words have lower search volume. For any industry for which this is true (i.e. any), you will find qualitatively similar results.

If you think about it, it's a trivial result. In any other industry if I tell you "I'm going to focus on increasing the ROI of 10% of our sales", you'd laugh. Why not focus on increasing the ROI of the other 90% of the sales?

However, it does depend on the account. On an account where you have the same number of 2 word keywords as 5 word keywords, of course the 5 word keywords will have a tiny tiny percentage of the impressions (say 1%). But obviously a marketer who goes for the long term strategy will tell you that you need 100x more 5 word keywords, in which case the 5 word keywords would have the same number of impressions as the 2 word keywords. But in comes the author's argument that you can do virtually nothing to manage that many keywords (we'd be talking millions here).

It is certainly correct that in any other industry you would focus on the 90% of sales not the 10% however when it comes to Adwords many marketer seems to completely overlook this in my experience.

I would disagree with your second point though. If you take a look at the search query data you will see that over 80% of the searches come from where users have typed less than 2 words in length. Only a small number of impressions are coming from searches that are 5 words or more in length so even if you had 1 million 5+ word keywords you would never be able to get the same number of impressions as you would with 2 word keywords if that makes sense.

By all means it is possible to manage accounts with huge numbers of keywords and we regally do at Clicteq through using things tools such as Adwords Editor and Adwords Scripts, however I would argue that for doing this with 5+ words keywords is probably not an effective use of your time

> I would disagree with your second point though. If you take a look at the search query data you will see that over 80% of the searches come from where users have typed less than 2 words in length. Only a small number of impressions are coming from searches that are 5 words or more in length so even if you had 1 million 5+ word keywords you would never be able to get the same number of impressions as you would with 2 word keywords if that makes sense.

No, it doesn't make sense.

10k 2-word keywords: 1M impressions/day

10k 5-word keywords: 100k impressions/days

If I now increase the number of 5-word keywords to 100k, what do you expect will happen? I expect to get abobut 1M impressions/day

If you look at our data that shows how long each search that users are making is you will see that 94% of searches made by users are 4 or less words long.

Short tail keywords will still catch long tail phrases with BMM for example the two word keywords +ppc +agency will still catch a search like "ppc management agency prices in york" which is along tail search query.

If you add 1000000000 million long tail keywords to capture that 6% of long tail searches that will never = the 94% of searchers that are shorter than 4 words in length.

So 100K 5-word phrases = 6K impressions and 10K 2-word phrases = 94K impressions

Hey, you're correct about the data being from a couple of account with a few hundred thousand in spend. We have however run this on several accounts with several million in spend and found very similar results in varying different industries. By all means test this on one of your own accounts and see the results for yourself, Id be interested to see what you find!

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