How to Decrease Cost and Improve ROI for Long-tail E-Commerce

Consistent conversions on long-tail e-commerce niches are any e-commerce marketer’s dream. These niche products contribute a significant chunk of your revenue with minimal search traffic. But maximizing conversions while keeping ad costs low for niche e-commerce businesses is tricky.
That’s what we’re here to help you with today. We’ll discuss in this article:

• The difference between long-tail and short-tail searches
• Unique challenges faced by marketers targeting long-tail searches and their solutions
• How to optimize your keyword-based ads for more long-tail conversion opportunities

What is a Long-Tail e-Commerce Product?

Long-tail e-commerce products are high-cost (more than $1000) products. Buyers don’t follow an immediate path to purchase, instead spending an average of 79 days considering the purchase before buying. They spend the time comparing products and looking at customer reviews to decide.

Selling long-tail products helps you reach your ROAS and revenue goals significantly faster. For example, if you’re an audio entertainment brand, selling a single $2,000 entertainment system is equivalent to selling over 20 pairs of $80 earphones.
Your challenge is finding people considering these purchases and gently guiding them to a purchase decision.

How Do Long-Tail Searches Differ from Short-Tail Searches?

Short tail keywords are searches that contain three words or more. These are more general and are used by people who are still exploring options. Short-tail searches attract more traffic with a lower intent and cost more.
In comparison, long-tail searches contain over three words. People searching these specific queries are more likely to convert if a relevant product shows up along their path to purchase. Therefore, long-tail keywords attract less but higher quality traffic. They may cost more than short-tail searches from higher keyword spend to search volume traffic.

Focusing on long-tail e-commerce product searches is the way forward. But there are a few challenges to keep in mind as you craft your search campaigns.

Three challenges faced when marketing long-tail e-commerce products and how to overcome them with keyword-based ads

1. Keeping ad distribution costs low while maximizing audience reach

These two years have been fantastic for e-commerce growth. Forrester estimates e-commerce is worth $4.2 trillion worldwide, with retail sales increasing by 16.8% in 2021.
However, brands are also spending more on e-commerce advertising. Brands spent $58.5bn on e-commerce advertising in 2020.
You may have felt these rising costs too. Higher ad spending, diminishing returns and higher expectations on ROAS.
It’s enough to make any marketer sweat during reporting season.
So what’s a marketer to do?

Solution: Targeting people with higher intent with long-tail keyword searches using Reverse Search Ads

But if you’re thinking of plucking in some relevant long-tail search terms into Google Ads and relying on their mysterious algorithms to deliver the goods, think again.

Google Ads is fantastic for impulse purchases. People search for a keyword and click on the most relevant ad, which sends them along their way to purchase. But you don’t want people who want to buy lower-cost products impulsively. You’re after people who carefully consider purchasing more premium items.
Google Ads doesn’t perform as well here. And there’s another problem to think about: click fraud or accidental clicks, Wasting your precious ad budget while inflating your numbers.

We would love to propose an alternative solution that may help solve these issues. We base Reverse Search Ads on our own cost per intent model. Instead of paying when visitors click on your ad, you pay when visitors show a strong intent.

We only charge when viewers fulfill one of these three conditions:

• A minimum of 22 seconds on the page
• Click through over three pages.
• 100% scroll depth

This simple tweak reduces ad spend while ensuring your precious ad budget brings in only the highest-quality leads for your e-commerce business.

2. Running e-commerce ads are exceptionally competitive in a new privacy-first world

The online advertising world saw a considerable shift towards privacy, with Apple introducing more stringent privacy requirements in April 2021. Google Chrome is also planning to block third-party cookies in 2023.

With people giving iOS apps permission to track their behavior only 25% of the time since inception, e-commerce companies relying on Facebook Ads can’t target their ads precisely and less effective ad campaign measurements.

At the same time, advertising costs on Facebook and Instagram have been at an all-time high since late 2020. It’s no wonder e-commerce marketers feel more pressure to deliver results among more competition and less effective online advertising tools. Online advertising needs to evolve with the changing requirements.

And we’d like to suggest a way forward.

Solution: Get ahead of the competition with ReverseAds’s privacy-focused Reverse Competitive Ads

Here’s how Reverse Competitive Ads works:

Step 1: Analyzing which websites, traffic and keywords bring in your competitor’s traffic.
Step 2: Identifying your competitor’s targets based on Step 1.
Step 3: Redirect quality traffic to your website and convert your competitor’s traffic with personalized ads.

We’re also committed to privacy with cookie-less tracking and fully anonymized data, ensuring compliance with worldwide privacy legislation like GDPR, CASL and CCPA.

And a privacy-first approach comes at the right time.

3. Ensure relevance to your customer through precisely targeted ads without compromising privacy

A spray-and-pray approach to digital advertising isn’t practical anymore. A 2019 analysis of Internet users by GlobalWebIndex shows Internet users are tired of irrelevant and intrusive ads.

• 50% of APAC internet users use ad blockers
• 64% feel ads are annoying and intrusive
• 48% believe ads are irrelevant to them

Getting your ad targeting right the first time around is crucial.

Un-targeted and irrelevant ads annoy potential customers. Tap on contextual information like location data and device information to personalize your ads to your potential customers to enhance click-through rates.

Solution: Personalized ads that use predictive technology to roadmap a user’s buyer’s journey.

ReverseAds’s Keyword Assignment Algorithm integrates artificial intelligence technology and keyword search advertising to roadmap a user’s buyer journey, and to accurately predict which websites your target audience is likely to visit next We place ads only on the websites where they’re likely to convert.
This approach is significantly more helpful than using third-party cookies to follow your audience around with re-targeting ads.
Why? Think of it from your buyer’s point of view.
Let’s say you start shopping online for a pair of new headphones. You find one you like, but you need more time to think about your purchase (it costs $1,500!). So you navigate away from the site buying nothing.

You’re mildly interested, but need more time to decide. Or you found a better offer elsewhere.
Moments later, when you’re scrolling Instagram, you see an ad displaying a pair of headphones that look suspiciously similar to the one you added to your cart moments ago.
That’s re-targeting.
Following a user around to encourage them to buy an expensive purchase is creepy when they’re not ready. It can even dissuade them from future purchases.
And it’s harder to gauge user intent from cookie-based retargeting ads.

Therefore, getting your ads right the first time is critical. ReverseAds uses predictive technology to identify buyers moving towards a purchase. We then predict where the consumer will go next to guide them into a conversion compared to mindlessly following users around the Internet.
Learn more about our predictive analytics solutions here.

Elevate your e-commerce ad experience for your customers while lowering ad costs

Finding your high-intent customers and engaging them with personalized keyword ads is tricky in a privacy-first world. We’re here to help!

Find out more about ReverseAds solutions for long-tail e-commerce businesses here. Or schedule a meeting with our specialists to get a complimentary consultation.