Gmail Beta: the Effective, Cheaper Alternative to Email Marketing

Gmail Beta is a new advertising format option from Google that’s currently offered to some advertisers that are partnered with Google Adwords. While Google has not specified who can participate in the Gmail Beta trial, clients who spend 6 figures or more in Adwords generally qualify. The great thing about this program is it gives advertisers the option to advertise to Gmail users, which means a potential audience of over 500 million users.

Gmail sponsored promotions are shown to the user at the top of their promotions tab this ad is known as the teaser ad. A small image can be shown along with a subject.

When a user clicks the teaser ad, it expands to occupy the entire page as you can see from the rich promotion image below. In addition to this rich promotion ad an ad also appears on the right-hand side with the company logo and promotional text. The small ad to the right supports html, images and video. The “Why this?” question underneath the small ad tells the user they have the option to click over to the advertisers website, move the email to their inbox, save for later or forward it to their friends.

Gmail Beta ads are fairly easy to set up if your team is already accustomed to creating emails as all that’s need is copy for a short bullet list, copy video or a picture for the right hand side ad and a small teaser image (usually the company logo).

Gmail offers several targeting options for the program:

1. Interests
2. Keywords
3. Domains
4. Purchases
5. Jobs
6. Gender
7. Age
8. Locations
9. Desktop vs. mobile
10. Languages

Tracking

Gmail Beta programs are offered to Adwords advertisers so if the Adwords tracking code is on the site it will keep track of all conversions from Gmail.

Gmail sponsored promotions offer several options for reporting, which will help with optimization.

1. Time reporting- Shows data on how well the campaign is performing and shows you data by the hour or the day.
2. Keyword- Shows which keywords are working for your campaign allowing you to eliminate the ones that aren’t working for your campaign and add those as negative keywords and/or remove them from the campaign.
3. Jobs reporting – Also known as criteria reporting. When bidding on a jobs campaign this report allows you to see what types of jobs converted into leads.
4. Criteria reporting – Shows user location attributes
5. Campaign health- Shows health information about the campaign such as issues with budget, ad approvals etc.

If targeted right and with a great offer Gmail Beta campaigns can be very successful. The great thing about it is you can reach new customers who haven’t even heard of your offering without having to pay for a 3^rd party list and getting into trouble for emailing people who have never heard of your site. To get started with Gmail Beta ads contact Google's marketing department today.