Adwords question - how does bidding work for long tail terms?

[baldidiot]

Is anyone out there an adwords expert? I've put a few hundred through it to experiment and I've found that the paid visitors tend to be more engaged (lower bounce rate, higher link click rate) although I can't say for certain that those clicks led to sign ups.

So now I'm planning on doing a new experiment by using a site that doesn't have any real traffic - this would hopefully let me try and assess the value of CPC advertising.

Annnnnyway. Here's my question - when you have a long tail keyword such as "purple casinos" (obviously made up) are you only competing against other people who are also bidding on "purple casinos" or does the bidding for the word "casinos" also come into play?

[davemerry]

Not an expert in the PPC field sadly, although I've dabbled in conversations with friends who are, so prepare take what I say as potentially useless .

Not if the user has selected exact match and hasn't placed a bid on that keyword directly...

There is ways people can bid on any keyword variation by inputting a certain code, for example '*word* casinos', which would mean it would potentially come up for any query which mentions the keyword 'casinos'.

Also by selecting broad match (rather than exact) on a keyword such as 'casinos' Google may automatically put them in for 'Purple casinos', but if they selected exact then they wouldn't appear.

It is also worth noting that if they do the above then their quality score could be lower as they haven't targetted that term in particular, therefore anyone who targets it directly could be ranked higher regardless of a lower bid.

Probably someone here who can explain it better than me thought I would give it a shot anyway!

[baldidiot]

That makes sense, thanks mate.