Email marketing is dead.  If you’re using email marketing for cold traffic, stop it.  People hate it, it’s annoying and it has the lowest conversion rate of any marketing channel on earth.

Gmails Ads, on the other hand, works like magic! This is your shortcut in getting into hundreds of thousands of inboxes without sending a single email and best of all, without being spammy. Another advantage of using Gmail Ads is they work well because you can target the right market using audience targeting.

In this article, How To Create Gmail Ads in Adwords, I will be showing you how to create Gmail Ads in Adwords, which will drive warm leads and customers to your business.

 

Watch the video version of this article below:

Why run Gmail Ads?

Before I go into the step-by-step process of how to create Gmail Ads in Adwords, let me just mention some facts:

To date, Google has 4.03 billion active Gmail users. Everyone loves Gmail because it is free. As part of this free service, ads within Gmail are shown to users based on the agreed terms and conditions of using the free email in Google.

For this reason, businesses have immediate access to Gmail inboxes and can easily target people who are likely to buy. But you may ask, how does Gmail know who are the potential buyers? Here’s another fact:

Gmail is owned by Google, who is considered to own data that they tracked from all their channels. In short, nobody on earth has as much data on buying intent as Google.

That said, Gmail ads are still affordable compared to other ad networks available because not a lot of marketers know how to run ads on this platform. And that’s another big opportunity for you if you just take the time to set it up.

 

Steps in creating Gmail Ads

You can see a sample Gmail Ad below:

 

 

The above image is an example ad teaser seen in their inbox. When clicked, this ad can be viewed in an expanded form below:

 

 

The users have the option to “save to inbox” the ad shown to them. It will be placed in their inbox like a regular email and they can forward the ad to other recipients as well.

Setting up this kind of ad is easy.

To start, go to Google Ads dashboard and click the “New Campaign” option on the top left, then the plus (+) button, and you will be taken to the Goal section:

 

 

Click the last option, “Create a campaign without a goal guidance”. This will give you more flexibility in terms of creating a powerful ad and an ad that suits your campaign.

 

 

Under Select a campaign section, click the “Discovery” option, then click the “Continue” button, which is the blue button on the lower left part:

 

 

You should be taken to the form page. Just fill up the information shown below:

 

 

Some helpful tips for you: On campaign budget, you can get started with $10 a day and scale up when you see your ads converting.

As for the Ad Group form below, just fill-up the Ad Group name and then proceed with the Audiences section.

 

 

In the audience section, you are given a pre-selected audience to use. However, if you want to select and customize your audience, you can simply do a quick search and you will be given options to select.

Some helpful tips for you: It is important to define your audience and segregate it according to type.

Like for example, if you are in shoe business, it is important to group your audiences. For the shoe business, you can segregate the audience according to gender: men and women.

Once you are done selecting your target audience, the next step is to create your ads. The create ads section is very straightforward and you can simply fill in the needed information below:

 

 

Some helpful tips for you: Make sure that you utilize the description section for the ads. The description section allows you up to 90 text characters and you can also create 5 different descriptions. Be creative with your descriptions and make sure you maximize the 90 characters in the description box.

 

Additional reading: You may refer here for the complete guidance on creating Gmail ads, including the technical specs for the ads.

 

Conclusion

Once you got everything set-up, you just have to monitor and track everything like clicks, click-through rates, and saves. Tracking will help you improve your Gmail ads and it will be easier for you to scale up once you get more leads.