So everyone knows about Google search, right? Yep, the stats are amazing — how about 40,000 searches every second. Couple that with a straightforward method of advertising, and you and your competitors end up pushing up click costs everyday of the week.

Now let’s look at an audience that most are not aware they can advertise to. How about the one billion active users of Gmail? But before we get into the detail of what’s on offer and how it looks, let’s think through some very simple scenarios of where this type of advertising may make sense.

Let’s start with prospecting for new business. Here, the more you know about your ideal audience, the better. So you may have a guide on the email newsletters they could be subscribed to, or even the websites they may visit. The targeting options would then allow you to show your advertising to those who have emails in their Gmail account from these subscriptions, or that contain links to those websites.

Secondly, you can also layer this type of advertising over your standard remarketing campaigns to bring back those who have visited your website before. (Not sure what remarketing is — try this short primer article.) So someone visits your website on the hunt for a new rug for their lounge room. They browse through your options, but leave to carry on more shopping. Now you know the competitors they could shop with, so maybe you could target your ads to those who have visited before and who have emails in their Gmail account from your competitors?

These are two straightforward examples, I realise. Now let’s have a peek at how the ads display. There’s a nice surprise in store here for those who want to make the most of what’s on offer.

First up, let’s have a peek at how these ads initially appear in Gmail. The image below highlights two ads that popped up in one of my personal Gmail accounts. I use this to capture newsletter or social chatter that I don’t want cluttering up my business address.

We will pick up on the second ad from Grammarly. I have visited this site before, so I presume they are remarketing to me. I click on the ad, and that’s the charging point for Google. Just like search advertising in how it is charged, BUT the difference is what happens next.

With this advertising you are not immediately sent to the website but are dropped onto a separate landing page that, as an advertiser, you can control the look over, within certain parameters. In this case it looked like the image to follow.

There’s plenty of options as to how this could be set up. And video could have been used to explain more, but in this case they went with testimonials and a big bold red button which I clicked to hop across to their website. My click from landing page to website was not charged. Therefore it makes sense to make this page as convincing as you can to make the most of that first click cost.

Sound interesting? With general paid-search click costs heading north, this one tactic may be responsible for taming that skyrocketing cost per lead. You never know if you don’t try. Give us a call today if you are interested in running a test.