By Brendan Almack on 28 Jan 2016
While Google Sponsored Promotions (GSPs) existed in beta for about 18 months, accessible to some AdWords advertisers only, the announcement of Native Gmail Ads in September 2015 opened up the advertising format to all. Here, Brendan discusses a particularly effective tactic for using Native Gmail Ads: competitor targeting.
Video Transcript:
Hi everyone! I'm Brendan and today I'm going to be talking to you about Native Gmail Ads. So you might know them as GSPs (Google Sponsored Promotions) and they've actually been around for a while. They've been in beta for about a year and a half and Google have renamed them Native Gmail Ads, and they've been rolled out across AdWords accounts.
What are Native Gmail Ads?
Effectively, they allow you to target anyone with a personal Gmail address. That's pretty cool, because globally there’s about 900 million people that have Gmail addresses, so that's phenomenal reach. The ad initially appears in somebody's inbox within the Promotions tab as a collapsed ad format. You can click on the collapsed ad format, and it expands out. And within the ad, it includes some really rich product information, some deals information. You can tell a lot more about your story than you could in a banner ad, for example.
Using Competitor Targeting with Native Gmail Ads
We found a great tactic for Native Gmail Ads is Competitor Targeting, because within Native Gmail Ads I can target keywords, and I can effectively target my competitors' keywords. When I target my competitors' keywords, like my biggest competitor, for example, I'm effectively targeting anyone who's receiving an email from my competitor. So these might be people who actually subscribe to my competitor's newsletter. That's really exciting because your competitors are out there working really hard and breaking their balls to get people to sign up to a newsletter. Meanwhile you're coming in through the back door with Native Gmail Ads and targeting the exact same user. It's a great way to get in front of your competitor's customers.
Overlaying Google AdWords Targeting Options
A great refinement to that targeting is something that we've been doing in the U.S. We do work with a luxury hotel, for example, here in Dublin. We're targeting American people. We're targeting their Gmail. We're targeting for keywords like ‘Aer Lingus booking confirmation’, ‘Dublin trip’, ‘holiday Ireland’, ‘holiday Dublin’, etc. But then we're overlaying that with income targeting. So we're targeting the top 10% earners in America, for example, because effectively we just want rich Americans. This is a luxury hotel in Dublin so this is a great way for us to target rich Americans who are coming to Dublin.
