How to Find Killer Deals With Gmail Sponsored Promotions

Looking for a unique way to reach more prospects this month?

Want to reach prospects that are desperate to sell...before your competition gets to them?

Imagine for a moment, that you're a fly on the wall. You overhear a discussion between a woman going through a divorce and her attorney. She tells the attorney, "I just want to get rid of the house as quickly as possible".

Knowing this, you'd have the upper hand in being "first to market". Clearly, this prospect is motivated and willing to sell at a price point that can produce serious revenue for you.

Enter Gmail Sponsored Promotions--or GSP ads for short.

What are Gmail Sponsored Promotions?

Simply put, Gmail Sponsored Promotions are ads served to users within Gmail.

You simply target Gmail as a placement in a Display Network Only campaign and opt to do one of the following:

• Bid on keywords relevant to your objective
• Target topics that are relevant to your objective
• Bid on competitor names and URL's

There are a few other targeting options, but I'll keep it simple for now.

To get your creative juices flowing, here are a few reasons why someone would need to sell their home quick.

• Planning or in the middle of a divorce
• Can't afford to pay taxes on the home
• Sex Offender Nearby
• Going into assisted living

There's a ton of reasons why someone would want to sell quick, but for the sake of this discussion, let's stick with the divorce niche.

For a keyword targeting campaign, you'd simply target Gmail as a placement and layer keyword targeting onto it. In this case, it would simply be "divorce". 

Now, you're targeting people that are talking about "divorce" in their email communication. Will everyone be a perfect prospect? No. But the chances of finding a perfect prospect through this type of ad targeting is very high.

For a topic targeting campaign, you'd simply add Gmail as a placement and layer topic targeting on to it. In this case, you'd probably want to target the Adwords topic of "Divorce and Separation".

For competitor and URL campaigns, you could collect the names and URLs of:

• All of your competitors (local)
• Nationally known competitors
• Names and URL's of divorce attorneys (local)
• Etc, etc

Now, any time your targeting options match a users email content, your ad will show.

Here's what the desktop ad would look like in Gmail:

Here's what the mobile ad would look like in Gmail:

Upon clicking, the user will then see the expanded version of the ad.  It looks like this:

The expanded ad has a call to action of "Call Now" and the user can click-to-call from a mobile device.  You can also opt to have the user click through to a landing page.

Here's How to Setup Gmail Sponsored Ads

Step #1) In order to set up this campaign, you'll need to create a "Display Network" only campaign. You'll also want to choose, "No Marketing Objective" and select "All Features". Be sure to give your campaign name a clear, objective-focused namespace. This way you can be sure to identify it within Adwords, as well as other platforms that need to connect to Adwords (i.e, Google Analytics, 3rd party reporting, etc) 

Finally, in Step #1, be sure to add location targeting. In Adwords, you can target by zip code, city, county, state, country. Don't expect much traffic (if any at all) if targeting a single zip code, city or county with this method, though.

Step #2) Here in step 2, we'll configure: language, bid strategy, budget and call extensions. For language, you should choose the language of the intended audience you are advertising to. For the most part, you can leave this set to English. Though, if there is a niche market in your area that is primarily Spanish, for example, then you may want to segment this into its own campaign...with its own set of adgroups. Just go with English for now. 

Leave "Bid Strategy" set to "Manual CPC" for now. There're quite a few other options, like Target CPA (cost-per-acquisition) that you will want to setup later down the road, but initially, set this to "Manual CPC". 

For ad delivery method, leave this as the default (show ads evenly over time). For ad extensions, the only one you need to enable right now is: Call Extension. By adding a trackable phone number as a call extension (you are tracking your paid search and media campaigns, aren't you?) the person viewing the ad will see the phone number while on a desktop (and can choose to call without clicking on the ad...which Google won't charge for) or if they see the ad on a mobile device they can immediately "click-to-call" (which you will be charged for). 

There's no need to set a location extension since your prospects won't need to visit you at your location to do business.

Step #3) You should see "Advanced Settings". Go ahead and click it. The only section here you need to worry about is the "frequency cap". In other words, you want to limit the number of times a given person sees your ad on a daily basis. Why? Because you want as many unique prospects to see your ad as possible. Having the same person see your ad, yet not click on it, can hurt your CTR's, ad rank and thus quality score. 

On the other hand, having the same person clicking on your ads multiple times per day is not a good thing either. Especially if they aren't converting into a lead. 

Not only that, but it will quickly "eat" into your budget. These are the two main reasons we set a frequency cap here. For now, leave everything else at its default setting.

Step #4) Here's where things get interesting. We are now going to create "prospect segments". For the purpose of this tutorial, I will be creating a "prospect segment" that attempts to reach people planning or in the middle of a divorce. 

Chances are, if a person is going through a divorce, they are also highly likely to sell their home...fast. 

First, create a new adgroup and name it accordingly. You'll then create a max CPC bid. Under "Choose how to target your ads", select "Use a different targeting method" and select "Placements". In the search box, enter "mail.google.com and click 'Search". Google will then return the placement. 

Click the small arrow to add it to your selected placements. You're now targeting Gmail! 

But there's more. We don't want to show our ad to everyone. We only want to show our ad to people that are discussing "divorce" in their email communications. 

Here's how we do that. 

Right below the "Placements" section, you'll click "Narrow your targeting method" and select "Display Keywords". Enter your main keyword in the input box, which in the case would be "divorce". That's it. Don't type any other keywords. Now click "Find related keywords" and let Google scrape their database for relevant keywords. Go through each suggestion and if it's relevant, add it. 

Now we're cooking.

Here's another important part: once you've completed this, you'll see "Targeting Optimization". You'll also see "Let Adwords automatically find new customers" checked by default. 

Uncheck this. 

You do not want to do this. Why? 

Because you'll be "polluting" your audience and giving up control of ad serving to Google. 

This is Google's way of sneaking in more ad revenue by leaving this checked by default.

Step #5) You'll now create your ads. When Adwords asks you to create your ads, just choose "Skip Ad Creation". Your standard high volume IAB ad dimensions won't work here. 

You'll need to create Gmail specific ad banners. 

The ad dimensions are:

650px x [300px to 1000px]

You'll also need to include a "logo" that is 144x144px. It doesn't need to be your logo. It can be an icon that is relevant to your objective (a house, money sign, etc). This is actually preferred since a professional logo will sometimes not get as much engagement.

Want to Target Topics Instead of Keywords?  Here's How

Instead of using keyword targeting, you can try topic targeting like so.

To know if your advertising is working, make sure you setup Adwords conversion tracking. You'll be able to identify which keywords and topics are performing--and which aren't.

A few things you should do to increase performance:

• Setup conversion tracking to measure results and ROI
• Setup Site Retargeting in Google Adwords and Facebook Ads.
• Create multiple variations of ads and split test which ads give you the best ROI
• Test new "niches" to increase exposure and leads
• Once you find a "niche" that works well, expand to targeting this psychographic on Facebook Ads

Hope this helps some of you find and close more deals!