Adwords, the Long Tail, and not enough volume.

[realityhack]

So I have another question for people regarding Adwords.

There is always lots of talk here and everywhere else about 'long tail keywords'.
(Yes I know what they are. This may be a stupid question but it isn't THAT stupid)

In my market I am running into a fairly steep drop off between keywords that are fairly general and have plenty of competition and traffic, and keywords one level more specific that Google says there is not enough traffic on to show ads for.
For example Blue widgets = high traffic & competition, [large, small, new, used, etc.] blue widgets = too low volume.

So my questions are:
1. Has anyone else run into this across entire categories?
and more importantly
2. Best practices, do you leave up the keywords that are too low volume to trigger?

[tstolber]

Yes, sometimes some industry's don't have a lot of option - but thorough keyword research does help - KP recently posted some insightful aspects of keyword research going above and beyond the generic Google AdWords keyword search.

Also, for the benefit of anyone reading, the "long tail", an often lauded aspect of SEO, links and keyword research was originally a statistical analysis of stock in your inventory. It applies to SEO in that many of the keywords that people find one of your pages for wasn't actually the target keyword, but was related in some way (large or small). You have a tail of keywords that people find your site for starting with your best keyword with lots of searches, diminishing down on a curve (the tail) down to only 1 search. You may find that in the last 20% of the curve (look at it as a distribution ratio) there are some keywords that you could produce some more specific content for.
This content then would rank higher than the page it is in the long tail for, and you would generate a lot more traffic. You may find that out of the 20% of traffic on your long tail, you are able to generate 4 times more traffic by directly targeted pages.

Every industry and site is different, some have steep curves, some have very long curves.

To answer your questions in full
1) Yes
2) I have a threshold of 100 searches per month that I won't target below, but still apply long tail analysis to ranking pages.