Pay-per-Click advertising, and Google’s adwords in particular are an ongoing topic in this blog. To best determine how such campaigns will perform for you, we recommend testing, and more testing. One thing you can test is whether the search results pages bring you as much traffic as the “content network” a placements (pages and sites which carry Google ads dynamically).
We recently learned of another placement niche for your ads, on people’s Gmail pages. For whatever reason, they call it the “Funbox.”
The ‘Funbox’ is a little known reference to the top ad spot in gmail, and guess what? You can target it as a managed placement in your AdWords content network campaigns.
So how do you target the fun box? The fun box is not found in the placement tool, so you need to add this in manually as a managed placement (in the networks tab):
Also, one of the most common mistakes is to try and target gmail by adding ‘gmail.com’ as a managed placement. It’s important to know that to target gmail, you need to add the following as a managed placement:
If you see gmail is performing well for you, it’s best practice to create a separate campaign that targets only gmail users.
Here are the benefits of creating separate gmail targeted campaigns:
- Write specific ads tailored to Gmail users
- Develop keyword themes around Gmail messages (advanced strategy)
- Controlled budgets
- Transparency of performance
It’s not necessary to create gmail targeted campaigns when you are first testing out Google’s content network. The best strategy is to first start with a keyword targeted (or contextually targeted) content campaign, and monitor the performance of mail.google.com on the networks tab. If you see traffic and conversions are high, it’s a good idea to go ahead and separate out mail.google.com traffic into a separate campaign.
If you need help understanding or implementing pay-per-click advertising, BGAmedia is here to help.
Portions of this post excerpted from ROI Revolution Blog
