Introduction to Gmail Sponsored Promotions

Gmail Sponsored Promotions (GSPs) use email content to show ads to Gmail users!

Do you want your ads showing up in the email accounts to exactly the right person at exactly the right time?

Our intro video will lay your foundation for GSPs, how they work, and what to expect.

Timestamps:
[0:32] Description of Gmail Sponsored Promotions
[1:28] Targeting Method 1: Keywords
[2:00] Targeting Method 2: Domain Names
[3:08] Targeting Method 3: Interest-based
[5:12] Examples of GSP Ad Formats
[11:22] Cost-per-click
[12:37] GSP Metrics (forwards, saves)

Transcript:
What could you learn about someone by having access to their personal email account?

You’d probably learn what sort of dog food they buy, where they like to travel, who they do business with, what their personal hobbies are, what they like to do in their spare time.

Now imagine as an advertiser you can use this information to push your ads in front of those consumers right in their inbox.

With Gmail Sponsored Promotions you can do just that. Gmail Sponsored Promotions allow you to advertise your product right within the Gmail interface based on the content in the customer’s email account.

I’m Adam Arkfeld, owner of ParaCore, a pay-per-click lead generation agency.

[0:32] Description of Gmail Sponsored Promotions
Gmail Sponsored Promotions, also known as GSPs, allow you to do just that. You can advertise to consumers right within the Gmail interface.

When someone goes to their Gmail inbox, either in desktop or on mobile, the top one or two messages on the Promotions tab are generally ads.

The Promotions tab is turned on by default and Gmail encourages you to get there through notifications and letting you know you’ve gotten a new promotion.

When you click on that ad, it expands in a larger format and then consumers then interact with that format, go to a landing page, watch a video or fill out a form.

Google looks at your emails for the last 90 days or so and pulls out relevant keywords. Advertisers put keywords in the AdWords interface. Behind-the-scenes, those keywords are matched up so advertisers deliver their message to the right consumer, at the right time, within Gmail.

I’m going to start by talking about the targeting methods that are most common with GSPs. Those are Keywords, Domain Names, and Interest-Based targeting.

There are few others that are more advanced but we’re going to save those for another video.

[1:28] Targeting Method 1: Keywords
With keywords, it’s very similar to standard display advertising.

Advertisers put the keywords and AdWords and then those matchup against consumers and what emails they’re writing to their friends or closest personal contacts.

For example, if you have a consumer that’s emailing their significant other about dog food, and an advertiser sells dog food, those keywords will match up behind the scenes.

In the Promotions tab, the consumer will see an ad for dog food, maybe it’s a 10% off coupon, something along those lines, they’ll click the ad, it will expand into a larger format and then they’ll be taken to whatever message the advertiser wants them to see.

[2:00] Targeting Method 2: Domain Names
The next targeting method is Domain-Based targeting.

Domain-Based targeting is essentially the same as Keyword targeting but uses domain names instead of keywords.

With domain names, it’s not the websites that consumers visit; you’re not tracking their behavior. You’re tracking who they’re emailing and who is emailing them.

So if a consumer is receiving emails from your competitor, let’s say nordstrom.com is sending transaction receipts, newsletters, promotions, to a certain consumer.

You own a fashion boutique in Scottsdale Arizona, and your target market shops at Nordstrom but they also shop in your boutique. You might target nordstrom.com so that those consumers see your and you own a fashion boutique in Scottsdale Arizona.

Your target market shops at Nordstrom but they also shop in your boutique, you might target nordstrom.com so that those consumers see your ads because they’re essentially your target market.

So that’s a way to use Domain-Based targeting complementary.

You know, these are websites that my consumers like so I’m going to use those domain names to then advertise my services. You can also do it from a competitive standpoint.

If you own a pest control company and you are a little bit smaller player in town and there’s a very large pest control company that seems to dominate the market, you can target that domain name and try and steal those customers because those consumers are receiving emails from that company.

[3:08] Targeting Method 3: Interest-based
The third type of targeting is Interest-Based targeting.

The sheer fact that someone has a Gmail account means they also have a Google account which tracks their behavior as they surf around the internet.

If they’re visiting a lot of web pages related to health or fitness or healthy eating, they’re going to be tagged as health conscious.

In the AdWords interface, advertisers can decide to advertise to people that are interested in healthy living.

While this does not exactly correlate to the Keyword-Based targeting and Google searching through the keywords of a consumer’s emails, it does allow advertisers to market to individuals based on categories.

It’s more general interest based and doesn’t pull the keywords right out of their email accounts. All this conversation is really based around Gmail.com

A lot of companies use Google for Work, which is Google’s business platform, which allows people put on custom domains but still use the Gmail interface. Because those are paid accounts, GSPs actually don’t show for business accounts.

Advertising B2B, if you’re a B2B service provider, is much more difficult with GSPs. It’s a lot easier to go business-to-consumer because consumers own their personal email accounts and they’re in a personal mindset.

There are a couple exceptions where you can get creative though. If you’re targeting small business owners, there’s a fairly decent chance they might be using QuickBooks Online.

Say hypothetically you are zero.com, which is a competitor of QuickBooks. If people are receiving emails from quickbooks.com in their consumer accounts because a small business owner might be signed in or might be logging in to QuickBooks with their personal account, at Zero, you can target the quickbooks.com domain name and show ads to those individuals.

So while it’s in a personal account and it revolves a little bit more around B2C, you’re still targeting them from a B2B perspective because they might have some business aspects tied to their personal account even though it’s not exactly the right environment.

When you get into larger corporations, when people are strictly in their business accounts, it’s impossible to do GSPs because they don’t show ads in the paid accounts.

Now I’m going to go into the different layouts and formats that GSP offers.

[5:12] Examples of GSP Ad Formats
In creating a GSP ad, you want to create new ad from the ad gallery and choose Gmail ads.

When you select that, you have a couple of different options. You have a Gmail Image template, Gmail Single Promotion template, Multi-Product Catalog template, and Custom HTML.

The little graphics basically show you what the ads are going to look like. With an Image it’s one image, with the Single Promotion, you have the image here on the left, a headline, some text and then a CTA, which is the blue box. The Multi-Product has multiple images with just CTAs. The Catalog has a main image at the top with images beneath it which have their own CTAs. This main headline area right here, and then custom HTML is a custom upload you can do with custom HTML just like it says.

When you click the image template here, this is the standard AdWords editor. If we choose select image, I’m going to use a stock image, and then we’re going to do Beauty & Fitness and we’re going to choose this person that’s biking.

Okay. So that’s used for the thumbnail. That’s the very small icon that they see. You want that to be something that people really notice and pops out. It might be your logo but it might also be an image that You want that to be something that people really notice and pops out. It might be your logo but it might also be an image that resonates with what you’re actually advertising.

The advertising in this case is Paracore and we’re going to say, “Get 10% off bike rides.” Fill in those lines, “Bike rides are fun and good for you,” short description.

Then we can choose an additional image here or the main image. Here we go to Beauty & Fitness and let’s just say that now we’re going to show someone running.

Here we go, here’s bike riders. This is then the image that someone’s going to see when they click this ad. At the top of their Gmail inbox they’re going to see this ad on the desktop, this ad on the mobile, the mobile ad is actually much more prominent and noticeable than the desktop ad. When they click it, it’s going to expand into this larger format and you’re just going to see an image in this case because we just did the image.

So if I go back and check out the Single Promotion option, it’s the same sort of thing. We will grab a logo image from the stock image gallery; let’s do Food & Drinks this time.

I’m going to grab this sandwich because sandwiches sound good. “Save 10% on sandwiches. Free soda with purchase,” whatever it is.

There we have Paracore. Here is the ad itself, again we just built out the ad, the advertiser, the offer, and then a description, here’s the graphic that we selected, now we have this bigger area to add a photo on the left as you saw on the thumbnail, a headline, content and the call-to-action button.

Again we’re going to choose stock image gallery, Food & Drinks, and we will now show this grilled cheese sandwich which looks amazing.

Grilled-cheese lover, buy one get one free, let’s do this. When you make those changes you see that the ad has changed. You have the graphic on the left, headline, description, and then the call-to-action.

The experience for consumer is they will see either one of these ads on their desktop or mobile, they’ll click it, it will then expand into this and then when they click this button they will go to your landing page. So that’s where the two-click experience comes in.

They see the ad, they click it and they have to click it again to actually get to the next spot. The Product template is also pretty cool.

It has a number of different items that you drop here instead of a large image and a CTA. I’ll do the logo where you will do stock images, let’s do Hobbies & Leisure. Say sitting on the beach sounds great to me, okay, that looks appealing. And then down here we will choose more images.

We’re going to do surfing as one and then we’ll add another one and we’re going to do like beach, like soccer on the beach. Now you have a product kinda like this starting to be built out.

If you offer a number of services or products, you can list all those out. Again, they’re going to see this ad up here, it’s a fairly large ad on mobile, it is smaller on a desktop, when they click it, it’s going to expand and they’re going to see a lot more information.

And each one of these calls to action can be a custom call to action going to a specific product page or services page or whatever. It’s really cool to be able to show all these different options within just one ad.

And each one of these calls to action can be a custom call to action going to a specific product page or services page or whatever. So it’s really cool to be able to show all these different options within just one ad.

The Gmail Catalog template acts the same way as Gmail Multi-Product template except for it has a larger ad at the top and then it kind of has the product listings beneath it. So very similar, just a different format, and then when you get to Custom HTML you can basically do whatever you want.

You can add forms in here, you can add videos, and that is one thing I didn’t mention in these other ads.

Instead of doing images, you can also do videos. So if we go to the Single Promotions template, you can select a video instead and you can choose a YouTube video.

And then someone can watch a video right in their Gmail interface. This is really cool, you can do a commercial, you can have an educational video, you know, whatever it is, right in their interface.

They watch that, then they click the call to action, go to the landing page and you’re all set at that point. They then hit your landing page and just need to convert.

So those are the different ad formats and media types that you can use for the Gmail Sponsored ads. There’s a lot of flexibility, a lot of different options and with HTML the sky is really the limit.

Now that we’ve talked about the targeting and the various ad formats and media types, I’m going to talk a little bit about the cost for GSPs, because it’s different than normal AdWords, and also some unique metrics.

[11:22] Cost-per-click
When you’re using Gmail Sponsored Promotions, someone clicks the ad and it expands and they have to click it again to get to your landing page or interact with your business, it’s a two-step process. So it’s different than other AdWords advertising.

Because it’s a little bit different, the cost per click on that initial interaction is significantly lower than what we see in Google search or display ads.

To give you some context, our business, Pay-Per-Click advertising, is incredibly competitive on Google AdWords. Cost per clicks can range anywhere from $20 to maybe $30 per click just to get someone to the landing page, and that doesn’t even consider if someone’s actually converted.

With GSPs of our campaigns, if someone clicks the ad, it’s generally around 17 cents per click for that first ad open. Then, in order to get to the landing page, they have to click one more time and be taken to the landing page to see our message.

We see that from the initial click to the landing page, the general click-through rate gives us a price of about $10 per click. So about $10 per click is not amazing by a lot of businesses standards, it’s a heck of a lot better than $20 or $30 per click, and our conversion rates are basically the same with Gmail Sponsored Promotions.

So what you’ll see is that the initial click is incredibly low, in our case around 15 or 17 cents, but then the actual click to the landing page is significantly higher because it’s a two click experience.

[12:37] GSP Metrics (forwards, saves)
GSPs also have a couple of unique metrics that are not available anywhere else in AdWords.

Those are Forwards and Saves. So when someone sees the ad at the top of their inbox and they open it and it looks interesting, maybe they don’t want to do anything right now, there are two buttons at the bottom.

The first one allows them to save it, which essentially converts the ad into an email that’s going to live in their email inbox for as long as they want.

The next one is forward so they can forward the email to a friend if they think someone else might find it interesting. The metrics for these actions are actually available on AdWords so you can report on, so you can see how many people saved, how many people forwarded.

It’s kind of unique and is very interesting to know just so that you know if your ad is actually engaging people or how people are interacting with it.

That’s all I have today for Gmail Sponsored Promotions. If you’re interested in learning more, talking more about AdWords, my contact information is in the description below, and don’t forget to subscribe to our YouTube channel. We’re going to be releasing a lot more videos just like this in the upcoming months.

Thanks again.