I’ve blogged about long tail niche marketing before with a YouTube video that has become a classic amongst the exponential marketing community. Just click on the hyperlink to view it.
Even though as a small business, Internet advertising is not something you’re probably engaged in, a recent report by CONTEXTWEB reveals something that I have known all along, albeit anecdotally –
Average click-through rates (CTRs) for ads placed
on long-tail websites are 24% higher than
those placed on short-tail sites.
Long tail versus short tail marketing refers to specialised niches versus broad mass markets respectively. What’s of particular interest is that the MORE specialised and targeted you are with your web strategies, the greater the returns you’ll produce.
Our clients have known this for years – often out-performing their much larger, national competitors with very deep pockets.
Long tail websites—the millions of smaller websites with niche audiences—offer significant ad performance advantages across a wide number of verticals.
Among all 20 categories studied, long tail ads registered increased CTRs over short-tail ads, led by alcohol beverages (50%), B2B (48%) and charities (48%). The lowest long-tail lift observed was for auto advertisers, but still had (12%) better CTRs.
The trade off remains between quantity and quality of the communication. This is something we cover in depth in our Killer Kopywriting Konversations™ workshops as we help our clients design Killer Kampaigns That Konvert Klients™.
As shown below, among 21 publisher categories, 16 categories registered increased CTRs on long tail sites whereas in five content categories, ads on short tail sites underperformed long tail ads.
Data Source: CONTEXTWEB‘s Intelligence Report: Using Long Tail Sites to Optimize Media Spend was published in March 2011. It analysed digital media performance from roughly 18,000 publisher sites across 1,000 campaigns in the second half of 2010.
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