Google Gmail Ads Campaigns

Key Takeaways

yes google's gmail ads are part of the display network but there are some noticeable differences on how dedicated gmail campaigns work compared to your typical display campaign so in this video yes we're going to go through the campaign setup but some of the differences we're going to first talk about is going to be within your targeting options because we don't get all the options that you do for a regular display campaign for gmail ads and then i'm going to spend the most time going over the actual ad setup there's a lot that we can do with gmail ads and we want to go over everything that's possible no matter what industry you are in and more importantly we're going to showcase how these gmail ads differ than other types of display campaigns where you can have gmail as a placement there are differences between gmail placements and dedicated gmail campaigns and that's the most important part we're going to cover in this video if you've logged into a gmail account within the past couple of years you have probably seen a gmail ad showing up in your promotions tab so i want to see a few examples of what these ads look like if you are unfamiliar with them initially we see the brand name we see a bold headline and then we see a longer description if a user sees something that they like they can click on one of the ads and that's going to expand it now this is one example of just adding a single image creative to the ad itself but we see the same headline and description that was initially in that ad preview if the user likes what they see they can click on the call to action button and go to the website let's look at the other option and here we're pretty much seeing the same thing we have a value message headline reiterated in the description and if i want to i can click subscribe and that's taking me to their website where i can potentially sign up for this subscription if i want to let's say i was just checking my email and i don't have time to sign up right now because i gotta take a phone call what i can do is either on this blue button right here where we see it up above as i can save this email to my inbox and that's gonna be an engagement metric that we can track with gmail ads now that's in my inbox i can still open it up and now it's going to give me the option to forward this message on maybe this service isn't right for me but i have a friend who would love this subscription i can share this ad with whoever i want to if i'm emailing them and those forwards and shares are another metric that we can track with gmail ads so now we know what some of the ads look like the two ads i showed you were pretty simple i want to go into the actual campaign creation to show you what options you can add to your gmail ads as well as what targeting options we have when creating our ad groups to set up a gmail ads campaign within google ads we do have to select certain campaign objectives now at the time as we're recording and releasing this video the google ads help section is actually out of date the google help section says you can create gmail ads off of any campaign objective except the app promotion objective but that is not true and i'm speaking purely from a dedicated gmail ads campaign because if you select product and brand consideration you are going to get an engagement campaign these are the lightbox ads where we've had a previous video where you can check that out right here so if you want to create a dedicated gmail ads campaign i recommend you choose one of the campaign objectives within sales leads website traffic or you can choose the option to create a campaign without any goal guidance and to get things moving i'm going to select website traffic then you're going to want to select display as your campaign type then under the campaign subtype you will see the option for gmail after you enter in your url you can click continue and then we'll get to the main portion of the campaign setup feel free to update your campaign name your location targeting your language targeting and those options i'm sure you're pretty familiar with but for the options we get for bidding strategies we do only get a few to choose from now depending on the campaign goal objective that you have selected some of these options are a little bit different the main options you're going to get with gmail campaigns are going to be target cpa maximize conversions or you can choose manual cpc with the additional option to add enhanced cpc next we need to make sure we set our budget and then i briefly want to go under additional settings unfortunately this additional setting won't be available in this account because it doesn't apply to the industry but if you are in the hotel or rental business industries you are allowed to run dynamic remarketing ads for your gmail campaigns and there will be an additional setting underneath here where you can check a box and apply a data feed to run any sort of personalized ads so unfortunately i don't have a hotel or rental business to really show you how that setting works but just understand that it's there if it applies to you if the rest of the settings look good we can scroll down and then start looking at our ad group creation if you don't update your targeting to make it more specific to who you want your gmail ads can show to all users and by all users i mean anyone who uses gmail you probably don't want to do that so let's go through the targeting options for gmail ads because we don't get every single option like we do with a regular display campaign and the first option is going to be keywords now on the first page of the campaign up right before we moved on to this page we entered in our website url and because of that google's going to come with some suggestions on how we can reach people based on these keywords so we can't scroll down add a couple terms where we see could be relevant to our target audience but you do have the option to add your own list of keywords if you are going to use this option we recommend being as specific as possible so if you are in the e-commerce space add names of specific products or the names of exact brands that you're really trying to push try and stay away from the overly generic terms i know that's kind of what i have in here but this is just our website and demo for more of the either the b2b or lead gen side look at the services that you're offering and added keywords are very specific service names service types service categories and again try to avoid the really overly generic terms because that's where you can really hit some broad targeting and potentially get in front of the wrong audience the main bulk of gmail ads targeting is going to be with audiences and immediately we're going to start on the browse section just so we can go over all eligible audiences the first is going to be detailed demographics and we already had a video going over the very specifics of detailed demographics but what we can use for gmail ads are going to be users parental status their marital status education and home ownership status and there's going to be a few subcategories under each of these next you can use affinity audiences and i like to use affinity audience if i'm really trying to expand reach or create a very top funnel campaign even google will admit these are broader audiences i just clicked on one category of beauty and wellness and it only breaks down into two more specific categories think of all the related business topics services keywords about beauty or wellness so you can see for affinity that it is going to be pretty broad now one thing that you may have noticed was missing was the option to create custom affinity audiences while we typically can do that for a display campaign you cannot create custom affinity audiences for gmail specific campaigns so if you do need to get more specific head down to the next section for targeting because there are a few options here where we can really hone in on a user who's more in the research mode so we can look at in-market audiences and if you're trying to get in front of a user who's more likely to take action this is where i would start searching for some of those options if you're not finding the in-market audiences that you want or you thought that the affinity audiences were too broad that's where you can go and look at your custom intent audiences and your custom intent audiences are you using keywords and urls to pretty much create your own in-market audience you can do this by going into the audience manager within google ads selecting the in-market keywords option it has to be the in-market keywords option if you select google search terms that is a custom intent audience that can only be available for youtube advertising but to make things easier we do see this blue option right here that you can create a new custom intent audience right from the ad group creation another form of targeting we have is life events and we also have another video going into the specifics of all the options you have for life events targeting but to sum it up is that we have a few options to get in front of users going through important milestones in their lives there aren't a ton of options that we have for life events but in the life events video i do show you depending on if you fit the right industry how you can really capture on users emotion to trigger a response with your google ads next we can use remarketing and similar audiences so remarketing is pretty straightforward we can use people who visited your website interacted with your app if you've created those app audiences gmail ads are also the only display campaigns where we can use youtube user audiences so anyone who's watched any previous youtube video interacted with your channel that sort of thing you can only remarket to those users on the display network with gmail ads we can also use customer match for gmail campaigns depending on how you can segment out those lists you can use gmail to hit those users with a very specific targeted ad message so whether it's website visits youtube users or customer match i would recommend keeping those remarketing or customer match audiences separate from any of your top of funnel targeting the brand awareness and the user intent is most likely different and keeping those audiences separate will allow you to not only control your budget a lot better but most importantly control the ad message now we already talked about how custom affinity audiences aren't available for targeting options but there are a few more display targeting options that are also not available for gmail ads the first one is placement targeting and that one is pretty obvious because these ads will only appear on gmail the next option is topic targeting and i know that one can be a favorite for a lot of top of funnel advertising campaigns but again it is not available for gmail ads but scrolling down a bit we get a few more options to make our ad targeting a little bit more specific this is the basic demographic targeting this is not detailed demographics so we can look at specific gender targeting age targeting parental status and depending on what country you're in you may be eligible to use household income targeting and then last and this is one you're definitely going to want to check out when creating your ad group is automated targeting conservative automation will be the default setting checked for this section within your settings and any sort of automated targeting is letting google try to expand the reach a little bit to find similar customers that you most likely wouldn't reach with whatever targeting options you've already set your other options aggressive automation for whatever reason let's say you're really not getting any reach and you're not limited by budget in any ways you might want to have google help you a little bit get in front of a new audience or if you're seeing results initially aren't what you're looking for you can also choose no automated targeting do not expand the reach of my gmail ads just only use the targeting that i have set in the options above i will let you decide which automated targeting setting you want to choose but now you know what options there are and that you are going to start with conservative automation unless you change it yourself i added an ad group bid really quick but before we get on to the ad creation i do want to mention one more thing frequency capping is not available for gmail ads i know we do get that option with standard display ads as well as youtube ads but for gmail only campaigns that is not an option it's unfortunate but that's the way it is but now let's move on to how we can create gmail specific ads and there are two options that we can use the main one that i'm sure almost everyone is going to use is going to be to create a gmail ad from scratch to make google happy i added the https but first add your business name next you'll have 25 characters to use as the headline of your ad and let me blow this up a little bit first just so it's easier for you to see the ad previews so with just the business name and the headline we get an understanding of how the ad is actually going to look the preview on the left is when the ad is still closed and then the preview on the right is if someone clicks on the initial ad to expand it to see the content inside and now i shift it over to desktop so you also get an idea of what that preview looks like and how different the ads visually look between the two devices now with the headline you can use all 25 characters and know that all 25 will be visible to the user the description is where you have to be a little bit more careful and understand how it visually can show up to a user so i had a description ready just added it to the ad and you can see when the user opens the ad they'll be able to see the entire description but on the preview before the user even opens the gmail ad it gets cut off let's see how this looks on mobile for mobile it's even worse this is important to keep in mind if you want to try to have extra text that's going to add value and entice the user to even click and look at your entire gmail ad and this could be something you just need to test with multiple ad variations either way get your most important message in the front of your description think of this as your why message are you running a sale do you have a solid proof point that you can use that's easily going to capture someone's attention all right consider all those different options to make sure that part is always visible for your descriptions next we can go on to add assets first we can add some images to our gmail ads for your website google's initially going to scan it based on the url that we have within the ad to pull up images that we can use for our gmail ads and we can see we need to select up to two images and one logo we can also look at scanning our social media pages so there's facebook other options we have we can scan instagram i'm going to scan twitter too you can see we got some super serious images here but if we see one that we like we can select the image and google is smart enough they know i want to use this one as my logo so i can select that option this is our main image that we use for our youtube channel so i'm going to select that as my main marketing image and while it's optional i'm going to select this image as our header if i scroll down you can see these are pretty much just title cards and probably not the best option for a gmail ad if we don't see anything that we like from either scanning our website or our social media profiles you can upload specific images there's an option when michelle and i spoke at smx together and maybe we want to use this one if you don't have any good photography or creative whatsoever google does have stock images i just typed in marketing and we do get some pretty generic images so depending on your industry you could find ones that are good and some can be just pretty obvious stock photography if you've already run campaigns before and you've seen good results from certain creatives you can go to a recently used section and it's pretty much exactly what it is all the images and creatives that you've recently used will be visible here but then to get a preview of which assets we selected you can choose the option all the way on the right kind of get an overall view to see if these are the best options to use you can easily x out you can see i'm hovering over right now and exclude and then go back and add new images if you'd like but for now i'm just going to save these just so we can keep on moving so there we see i used our headshots as our logo there's an image of where michelle and i visited the cora headquarters that is the header image that is an optional element and it's not going to show up every time and then we use the banner image from our youtube channel as our main marketing image scrolling down again and switching to desktop you can see how much larger that headline image is on desktop versus mobile and what we consider our main marketing image really got shrunk down on the desktop experience that's why these previews are great you can really play around to see if the experience would be good on either device but besides images we can use videos and all these videos can come from a youtube channel we have another video that covers how you can use your youtube videos in other ppc campaigns besides youtube ads so that video is going to cover more than just gmail ads so if you're interested in still using videos and other creatives go check that one out but i just searched a specific keyword for one of our more popular videos it's pulling up our option first because we do have our channel linked to this google ads account and we also see our buddy aj right there hey aj and that's one option we can add to our gmail ad if i go back up and type in another keyword we can see both options are still checked so we can add multiple video creatives to our gmail ads to make things clear it does not have to be your own video from your own channel just make sure you have permissions to use anyone else's content within your ads but if we save this we can see within add assets our videos are there to potentially show up within our gmail ads i'm going to scale back a little bit and there i click the next preview and now you can see underneath the main message users can potentially watch some of your videos so if you have a product or service that's easier to showcase through a video than through a really small description or some images utilize that with a gmail ad keep those users engaged because like anything with video and youtube we can track all those metrics and use those video engagements to build some other audiences you can look at adding catalog images and push products through your gmail ads now the paid media pros website doesn't have any products yet but i typed in one of my other favorite stores again to scan for images i have no affiliation with funko i'm just using this for fun but whether you're scanning or uploading your own you can add product images to your website all right i tried to pause the preview so it doesn't move around anymore but we can see all the additional call to actions within this gmail ad now watch video is pretty straight forward but with your catalog images you can change what you want the cta button to say pausing again i updated it to shop now and now that i added in the final url that call to action and url will cover any of my catalog images i have within my gmail ad if i click on the provide multiple urls and calls to action link i can go in individually and update the cta and url for each product that you have attached to your ad i know i didn't do it in this example but most likely you are going to want that final url to be that exact product url to actually drive traffic to what the user wanted to see this is a weird-looking gmail ad right now we got michelle and i you got some marketing videos and then you have a toxin funko pop but hopefully you saw as we were building this thing that there really wasn't any set order between the images and the videos and they were changing the position every time we refreshed something and saw a different preview and we cannot prioritize the certain elements so i can't say just have the videos first and then the products or vice versa so the more we start adding to this ad the more variations of how it could appear understand that you may want to have less elements and just more ad variants to test and that's something that you're probably just going to have to play around with if we click on the more options element you can add a custom teaser as well as a teaser description and going back to mobile so the teaser headline is supposed to show up for unexpanded ads as i pause this one right here now you see instead of using my main headline and description on the left we see it use teaser headline and teaser description and then when the ad is opened then we see now it's using the ppc education videos headline and my full 90 character description if you want to use the same message for both don't use the teaser at all but this will allow you to change the message after a user opens it if you want to tell a longer story or add additional value information or sales propositions that you couldn't fit into that initial headline and description now besides a custom teaser if we click on more options we can change our call to action so the catalog images can be customized and we know the videos are going to show watch video but if we don't want our main call to action within this ad to be visit site we have 15 characters to change that message so now you see instead of visit site my call to action is learn more and this could be another option when you're creating multiple ad variants to see which one might have a better impact the last option for more options is going to be your color so you see everything was blue but michelle and i are actually big fans of purple so if you have specific color codes you can look those up paste them in there and now you see our call to action buttons have changed to the exact accent color that we have added we know this can be important for some accounts where they really want to maintain the brand standards they don't want to use a default color option they have to have strict brand guidelines and the exact colors but you can control that to some extent so then one more time on computer there we see a teaser headline and then my expanded headline and description we got purple call to action buttons we got videos in there and we got product so if everything looks good i can add this ad to the ad group if we want to go through all that again you do have the options to create all your variants highly recommended for testing i'm not going to go through and create another one but if everything looks good we can create our campaign now if you don't like the template look of the gmail ads that we just went through that isn't your only option advertisers do have the option to create a custom html gmail ad and upload it directly to google ads and i'm not going to go over the creation of a custom html ad today but if that sounds interesting to you or you know your developer can do it or your designer can do it here's the link right now where you can go and get more information on all the specs and the file sizes and everything needed to create your own custom html gmail ad i'm back on the same ads page i'm not going to have any stats there's no way we are going to run that ad we created but i did want to add some additional columns that you should always be looking at when you're running gmail ad campaigns you will always have your impressions and clicks columns and you can see all the elements that we added to our ads a user can expand it they can click on video elements they can click on shop category elements they can visit the website there's a lot of actions a user can do on your website but only the first click on your gmail ad will count towards this main clicks column that is because you are only charged for the initial ad click any other engagement that a user does within that ad will not be counted in the clicks column and you will not be charged for those actions now we see this additional column gmail clicks to website those clicks that again in the expanded ad are sending users to your website or those specific product pages from the catalog we created those clicks again are going to be counted in this column and in the opening slide when we talked about some of the benefits of gmail ads and how we saw one in the wild when we first started here is where you can track if people are forwarding the ad to other users or if they're saving it for later this will help you get a better understanding of the full impact of your gmail ads especially if you're running a sale a user might not be ready to purchase right there when they're looking in their gmail account but if they save it or they share it these are good engagement signals to understand if users are coming back eventually and purchasing or signing up for whatever service that you're selling now the main campaign setup we went over earlier was strictly for a dedicated gmail ads campaign however there are several other ways that you can put ads on gmail and not all of them are run through a display campaign format so i'm going to go over a few ways that your ads can still show up on gmail but not be a dedicated gmail campaign the first option that we can see in the header up top is that if you're running one of the newer discovery campaigns one of the placement options is going to be gmail now for looking at the discovery ad setup it's different we can add multiple headlines multiple descriptions and i scroll down a little bit we do have the option to add some custom call to action text we do have another video going over everything you can do with the discovery campaign and you can check out that video here but the other discovery ad format is a carousel ad where you can add individual product selections it's similar to what we could do with the catalog ones for a regular gmail ad but the ad format and the limitations are different as we're adding multiple headlines and descriptions we don't get the data as of yet of which combinations are serving so that lack of information may be a reason why you might not want to do discovery and run some dedicated gmail campaigns instead a second campaign type where your ads can show up on gmail would be if you're creating a responsive display campaign i already have it filtered by the gmail placement you can see it's looking pretty similar as the last example that we saw so just like a discovery ad campaign we can add multiple headlines multiple descriptions but a big difference between responsive display ads and discovery ads is that we get to add video options with our responsive display ads responsive display ads also have an additional option for a long headline which we didn't get in dedicated gmail ads or the discovery ads now what we also don't see by default within a responsive display ad is to add those individual catalog images but what you can do is potentially attach a feed to your responsive display ad and then that is where you can get a little bit more custom but again this isn't just gmail focus you are going to show up on a lot of the other websites within the google display network as well as potentially some youtube placements too so if that dynamic feed part is really important to you and you're not in the hotel or rental business you might want to shift more to responsive instead of just a dedicated gmail campaign and another option where your ads can appear on gmail is if you're running a smart shopping campaign i can't show you a particular example of what it would look like because i'd have to blur out everything from my client is showing but besides search results and the shopping results smart shopping campaigns can show up on display network youtube and there it is gmail understanding that if you are running there's really not much we can do from the ad standpoint with smart shopping it's pulling from your product feeds so still having a standalone gmail campaign is a better way for you to control exactly which products are showing up what call to action you want to use for those products and if you want to make it more engaging with additional videos everything that's just something that you're not able to do with a smart shopping campaign placement on gmail now we have a better understanding of what we can do with a dedicated gmail campaign i still think the most important part is going to be testing out a variety of different ad creatives now it's going to be different depending on what your goals are i know we talked about adding videos and that can be more from an awareness standpoint but still seeing what engages with their users different users want to do different things on the gmail platform they may not be ready to convert right away but you won't know it until you test out different creatives and now that you see how dedicated gmail campaigns work differently than some of the other campaign types with gmail placements you will have a better understanding of which one will be better for your campaign goals thanks for watching our video if you found it useful give us a thumbs up below we release a new video at least once a week so if you want to see more from the paid media pros channel be sure to subscribe