Commercial Registrant – Internet Marketing & Domain Names

There has been some talk in the internet marketing circles lately about how advertising on Gmail through Adword’s platform can bring amazing ROIs with dirt low CPCs.

It’s true.

Through Gmail you can get unbelievably targeted traffic for very low cost per click. Now that sounds like a paradox right? Adsense coming from email sites is fairly untargeted right? Well, the truth is that if you use the technique I’m going to describe below you will get laser-beam targeted traffic at fractions of the usual adwords click cost with very high conversion rates. You could promote your product of course, but since most people do not have a product you can promote affiliate offers. It works quite as well.

Imagine this situation: You login to gmail and send an email to a friend and somewhere in that email you say “I need to find a way to make money”. And once you hit send, an adsense ad appears on the right hand side saying “Need to Find a Way to Make Money?” – This phrase might not fit in the adwords title but it’s an example and I hope you get the point.

Or, you write an email to a friend and say “I hate working out ” and then an adsense ad appears saying “Do You Hate Working Out?”

Do you see where I’m getting at? I bet that you would like to be in the advertiser’s shoes at that moment because showing an ad which reflects the exact same thoughts and concerns of a potential customer at the exact moment he is having them is the dream of any advertiser. To be able to pitch his product at the exact time a customer needs it! That is what I call targeted traffic. Can you imagine the CTR and conversion rate if you could pull off something like that?

Here is the newsflash for today. You can! And most importantly, it’s easy!

Here is what you need to do. First, you need to create a campaign to show ads only in gmail. You do that by creating a campaign for content network only (do not check search and search partners) and set it to show ads only on placements you select. You then go on to select mail.google.com . Not gmail.com! mail.google.com is the official domain(subdomain) for gmail. I could get in depth in this but some guy from the adwords team made it easy by creating a video with instructions on how to setup a gmail campaign. See the video below and then read on on how to perform the “miracle” I mention above.

So now you have to set your keywords so that your ads appear whenever someone sends or reads an email containing them. But here is where it gets confusing(no worries, it’s still easy). In order to be able to laser-target your ads and pay minimal CPCs, you first need to stop thinking about keywords. If you are promoting a home exercise program and bid on keywords like home exercise, gym, abs, hard abs, workout from home etc, your ads will be somewhat targeted but you will also be bidding on the same keywords that thousands of other people are bidding on and you will end up paying more than you want to for not-so-targeted ads. Plus, you will not be able to show ads that reflect the exact same thought that the potential customer made just a while ago when he was writing his email.

So what do we do?

You stop thinking “keywords” and start thinking “phrases”. Bid on phrase match (see last post on Matching options when I go in depth about that) and bid on phrases that you think that potential customers of your home exercise program would use. Like for example the aforementioned “I hate working out”. Bid on that term. Create an ad group with just this term or a few closely related terms and write an ad for this adgroup that looks something along the lines of “Do You Hate Working Out?” – and then write your pitch in the description. Do you see where I’m getting at? Then think of other phrases your customers might use in their emails, create a new adgroup and write a new targeted ad. You will be bidding on terms that have virtually zero competition, so that has the added advantage that the clicks will cost you close to nothing. How does that sound? Targeted traffic at the lowest possible cost? Then it’s just rinse and repeat.

The traffic will of course be low, but gmail has hundreds of millions of daily users and usual phrases are being used all the time, so you will get some traffic and considering the high conversion rate it is definitely something worth the try. There are hundreds of affiliate products out there that you can promote and it’s a matter of leverage. How many of these campaigns can you create? The more you create the more traffic you get, more traffic=more sales, more sales= more money.

p.s I’ve been aware of this technique for a while now. However, I am also aware that Ryan Deiss is currently selling a course on this subject that covers A LOT more information than I have covered in this post. You can consider this post as an introduction to gmail advertising.

Visit EmailMindTricks.com if you want to learn more about similar techniques.