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Great tip here from Austin Lau on how to target Gmail PPC ads in the Adwords content network.  Remember to not to mix this in with the rest of your content ads nor your search campaigns, run it as a separate Adwords campaign to allow proper tracking.

Another important tip to make sure you are leverage this with the right mind set. Remember your prospects are in their email.

Example

Here is a real example of an email I sent my wife and lets look at what shows up in the Gmail Adword’s Ad.  For those, that can’t see the image below, the email says, “call a carpet cleaner before the holidays – thx!”

What if the ‘Funbox’ ad said this instead…?

Carpet Cleaners [your city] – CarpetCleaningXXX.com – 10% OFF if you mention “Gmail Ad”.  Call Now 416 XXX XXX to save!

It might get the attention of my wife a little more and it gives her a call to action based on her Gmail.  The point I am trying to make is to make sure you are writing Ads that are specific to Gmail users and remember people are reading their email, so you have to grab their attention from that.

Think of keywords that will be listed in people’s emails that would be relevant to your local business and write ads that will stand out and still be related to what their email might be about.

You also might want to write ads that can steal business from the competition too. So a long list of your competitions products and services would be handy, you can make Ads that make counter offers to your competitors products and services.

If you are creative with PPC you can find tons of low hanging fruit. Let us know if you have done any testing with PPC in Gmail in the comment section below, love to hear your experiences.

I just found this interesting post today at WebProNews.com where they revealed the Coles Notes version of a recent study done by two NYU Professors.   It basically shows that by having a strong SEO presence and running PPC ads together will improve your conversions rates.  If you would like to read the full meal deal, then you may do so here.  For WebProNews.com’s condensed notes see below:

• On average, the impact of organic listings on paid advertising is 3.5 times stronger than vice-versa, possibly because of the tendency of consumers to trust organic listings more than paid ads.
• The positive association between paid and organic listings increases advertisers’ profits by at least 6.15% when compared to profits in the absence of either of them. The positive association is strongest when advertiser-specific keywords are used and weakest when brand-specific and generic keywords are used.
• Click-through rates, conversion rates and total revenues are higher when both paid and organic listings are present simultaneously than when paid search ads are absent.
• The combined click-through rates are 5.1% higher when paid and organic listings are present simultaneously than when only the organic listings are present.
• The combined conversion rate increases 11.7% when paid and organic listings are present simultaneously than when organic listings alone are present.
• Paid search advertising drives up to 54% of total revenue growth.

I have been telling merchants for years now that the best strategy is to have both SEO and PPC campaigns running parallel with each and this study just proves more that this a great plan.  They make the perfect couple.  The King & Queen.  A great partnership that compliments each other…. you get the point.

What are your thoughts…? Let us know in the comment section below.

Many small businesses do not understand how Adwords PPC auctions works. They have a hard time understanding how rankings and pricing works. This video must be the most brilliant explanation on how it all works.

If you can track your efforts then you can improve on your results. A/B split testing should be a part of your marketing efforts. If you use Google Adwords you will want to use their free optimizer tool. Here is webinar explaining how to set-up Google’s free website optimizer.

Online videos and all the video sharing sites have been around for some time now and we all understand that they are a huge part of how the web operates, especially when Google purchased YouTube for $US1.65 billion. Google even claims that 13 hours worth of video is uploaded every minute on YouTube. The most current internet marketing news is how YouTube has released PPC (Pay-Per-Click) service that enables YouTube users to have their videos appear at the top of the search results on YouTube for keywords they choose in their ad campaign. Watch this video below where Product Manager Matthew Liu explains how you can you use Sponsored Videos to promote your videos on YouTube.

Michelle MacPhearson has also written a pretty good post on how to set-up a YouTube PPC account. According to Ed Dale (30 Day Challenge’s Maverick) at his Seesmic video account he states that video will be have to be apart of every persons marketing strategy and explains that YouTube is the #2 search engine in the world.

It is obvious this will be a great opportunity for all types businesses and artists to promote and help find their niche group of fans. I can’t wait for all the success stories and new IM’ing businesses that will develop due to this new PPC platform. I will assume that the other video sharing sites will also soon follow suit with their own pay-per-click just like how MySpace followed with their own PPC after Facebook’s PPC program finding huge successes.

I am now signing up for an account and will do some testing. Once I have done a some testing I will report back with the results on how I found YouTube’s new PPC. Before I do, what do you think this will do for your business? Are you currently using YouTube and videos to market your business? If not, will this maybe become a new marketing strategy for you? Let me know in the comments below…

Oh! And if you want to sign up too… go to: YouTube PPC