Why Your Merchandising Team’s Effort is Lost on Your SEM Team, Part 1: Leveraging Your Product Catalog

While such strategies seem practical, they can fundamentally undermine the performance of your campaign because of four primary reasons:

1. Cost: Head keywords are, by nature, readily apparent to all of your online competitors. This leads to head-term bidding wars which drive up cost per clicks.
2. Conversions: Long-tail keywords are naturally more qualified than head keywords. Consider "Kate Spade" (a head keyword) vs. "Kate Spade red heels size 7" (a long-tail keyword). The long-tail keyword probably represents a consumer who is further down the purchase funnel and more likely to convert into a buyer.
3. Marketing: Long-tail keywords give you the opportunity for more targeted marketing. Continuing with the Kate Spade example, you can write a more targeted ad that shows a more targeted landing page for the long-tail keyword "Kate Spade red heels size 7" than you can for "Kate Spade." More targeted marketing leads to more clicks and better ROI.
4. Bidding: Depending on broad match and head keywords will put you at a competitive disadvantage when bidding on high-conversion terms. If your competitors are mining the long tail, they'll be able to optimize budgets by strategically increasing bids on higher converting keywords and decreasing bids on lower ones. Your competitors will not only have more targeted advertising (as described above), but also more targeted bids. The quality of your traffic suffers as a direct result.

To avoid the pitfalls of over-relying on top-selling SKUs, head keywords and broad match, SEMs must use the most important internal asset available to them, the one created by their very own merchandising team: the product catalog.