In previous posts, I’ve discussed many of the paid search challenges that eCommerce brands selling thousands of products face. One additional challenge that is sometimes overlooked is the difficulty in accumulating adequate performance data at the keyword level to make meaningful optimizations. For some brands in certain industries – insurance for example – there are a smaller number of products and relatively common ways to search for them. Life insurance, homeowner insurance, car insurance, and variations of those phrases likely make up the bulk of converted search volume. For eCommerce companies with massive SKU catalogs, converting product searches are often specific, with very little traffic associated to each search. In some cases, certain keywords or products may only have one or two conversions in a year. Now, you might think, “why bother with those long-tail keywords that seem to be exceptions?” For brands that sell a lot of different yet specific products, these long tail searches can account for 20-50% of search revenue cumulatively.