Ever been creeped out by extremely targeted Adwords ads when reading your emails in Gmail?
Well now you can creep out other people too!
Here’s how you do it:
- Open up Adwords
- Create a content network campaign with managed placements only.
- Use mail.google.com as your placement to target ads on the right side of Gmail.
- Use “mail.google.com::Inbox, Top center” as your placement to target Funbox ads (the ads above emails in Gmail).
- Use titles of emails as your keywords.
This is the Funbox Ad Placement. As you can see I'm a worldclass photoshop pen tool artist
This technique can be used to simply add more impressions to your existing campaigns. Orrrrr you can start thinking outside the box and start targeting spam emails or emails you know have a large audience.
Let Mr Green explain…
Today I opened an email from AT&T with the title;
“Be the Perfect Valentine: Sony 8MP Camera Phone Package”
So if you wanted to target people opening these AT&T emails you use [Be the Perfect Valentine: Sony 8MP Camera Phone Package] as your keyword. Make sure you use “exact match” on the keywords you target.
Here are some ideas for ad copies for your Funbox placement:
“Perfect Valentines Don’t Read Spam. They Buy Jewelry. Check Out Our Range Now!”
“Take Our Valentines Quiz and Find Out How Perfect You Really Are!”
“Warning. Don’t Buy The Sony 8MP Camera Before You Read This…”
I’m sure some of you have signed up to your competitors mailing lists. Now you have one more way to get ahead of them. If not, next time you are having a browse in your spam box, have a look at the titles, they may be the inspiration for your next big campaign.
Last note: I’d like to thank the laziest, poorest guy with the most killer ideas (1 out of those 3 are true). James Zolman was the one who brought this tip to my attention.
haha!
poor is the truth…definitely the truth.
Thanks for the hat tip Lorenzo. I have run several profitable bizopp & finance related campaigns with this trick for targeting the gmail 'funbox'. The clicks are usually way cheap and you know if you're on a popular mailing list that you're going to get hundreds of thousands or even millions of impressions by targeting their subject lines…and if it's a great list, they're going to be emailing several times/week.
Too bad you beat that guy from the Meetup202 in Vegas to the punch. He's been putting a crappy guru product together about this for over a month now. Lulz.
@Lorenzo – nice outing of a technique. guess we will see more submit and rebill ads in the gmail funbox soon.
@Josh – i'm agasp. that analogy is like saying 2 guys might spend 6 months creating some snazzy product, then another dude comes by and says he can create the same product in 15mins. wtf, man?
@Andrew – You would be surprised at how little people take up tips like these.
Ha ha, Deiss is going to be crying over lost sales on his $97 ebook now.
Thanks for outing it, off to spam gmail.
Man… this internet is a small place. So there I was, searching Google for references to the Gmail funbox trick and – BOOM, I see "mrgreen.am"… "holy F%@^" I said to myself, when did I purchase a .am TLD and more importantly, when did I start an affiliate marketing blog? Dang, I must have drank way to much last week..
Wait! This isn't my website.
But what is even scarier is seeing ole' James Zolmon's mug on your list of recommended sites and comments. I thought I was the only Mr. Green in James' life (sob).
Anyhoo – I really like your site and had a good chuckle at some of your posts. Consider yourself added to my Google reader.
Cheers,
The other Mr. Green
Thanks for this post, I was looking for information like this.
Very great information.
Cool concept. Couldn't really make it work. Got 0 impressions and the AW reps weren't super helpful..
Adwords is really good in driving traffic to your website. however, they are very strict right now and they would not easily approve websites that they thought have low quality content. `.
It's a good idea but just a minor adjustment. The content network serves up the ads based on contextual relevance, or theme, so the keywords are important, but they don't need to be exact match, broad match is fine. Your ad copy needs to say exactly what you want it to though.