By Chris Lee

UK bookseller Blackwell is a familiar name on the UK high street and online, with more than 50 stores nationwide and over six million titles available for sale. With online sales increasingly part of its strategy, the company turned to digital marketing specialists Blue Barracuda to help.

A large part of the strategy involves so-called ‘long tail search’, more specific, precise search terms which Web users enter into search engines to find exactly what they’re looking for. With books this could be the book or author name, or the ISBN number of the book.

NMK’s Chris Lee caught up with Blue Barracuda’s CEO, Martin Talks, to learn more about the long tail and how it helped Blackwell.

Making the long tail wag

The book market is very competitive, Talks explains, so the likes of Amazon and Waterstone’s – who offer heavily discounted products and are able to bid on broad terms like “books online” - have high volumes of searches. But for retailers such as Blackwell, which specialises more in academic books, it makes more sense to focus on more precise terms.

“One of the key ways to drive people to the Blackwell site was through search,” Talks said. “We’ve been running paid advertising search campaigns across Google, Bing, across all the different search providers. We look at the whole [visitor] journey.”

The paid search campaign included author names, book titles and ISBN numbers, which meant millions of keywords and titles to cover the vast number of potential searches. Talks said a lot of feed technology and automated bidding systems were used to optimise the performance of the keywords and ensure Blackwell appeared highly in long tail search results.

Talks said that successful long tail search also relied on a combination of technology and human interaction, looking at ad copy used to see which words were most likely to convert into sales for Blackwell.

And the success of the pay-per-click (PPC) campaign is demonstrated by the results:

• Since it began, the paid search engine marketing campaign has delivered a significant increase in sales and a 74 per cent increase in revenue since it began a year ago

• Over the past twelve months, the cost-per-acquisition has been decreased and the return on investment is almost double the target set by Blackwell

• The ongoing PPC activity has delivered an increase in the conversion rate of the search campaign and greater insights into user behaviour which can be used across the business

• The success of the Blue Barracuda’s search engine marketing activity has enabled Blackwell to increase the proportion of the marketing budget allocated to search

Top tips for the long tail

Talks says that firms looking at long tail search should think before they act and build slowly and methodically.

“Don’t just launch into bidding on big, broad terms just because you think there are a lot of people searching on those terms, because it may turn out you spend all your money very quickly,” Talks told NMK. “Keep the line of relevancy from the search term right the way through to where the product is on your site. Don’t make [visitors] work too hard, if you just send them to the home page every time then they have to search for the product and could get easily put people off.”

Talks recommends businesses use tools such as Google’s Search Query Report to select relevant keywords, and include as much specific information – such as product codes – in ad copy.

“Digital is a great medium to test and trial things, you can start and stop with paid search,” Talks concluded. “It’s a great place to see if things are working, to announce developments or offers, it’s a very flexible medium so use its flexibility.”

To hear the full interview with Martin, please click through to the author’s long tail search podcast.