-by Sid Hale

On the 1st of April, Google decided to announce a new service, and there was a lot of speculation about it being an April Fool's Day prank (a couple of years ago they flipped the Google logo on the home page so that it read backwards - this company is known for a sense of humor).  The new service (GMail) is a free email service ala Hotmail.

Besides the date of the announcement and their track record with this sort of prank - the fact that Goggle was to provide 1GB of disk space to store your messages vs. the 4-5MB typically provided with this type of service, just fanned the flames of its being a hoax.  Instead of working so hard to organize your email into folders, and keep them cleaned out so your inbox wouldn't get so full, you would have 1GB of mailbox space!

Why would the most popular search engine provider decide to move into the free email arena?  The announcement explained that email is just more information, and that the purpose of this service was to make their customer's email messages easily accessible using search technology - eliminating the need for folder organization, and allowing related messages to be presented as a thread from a single search.

News services were clamoring to get the inside skinny and discussion boards had long threads on the topic.

At the end of the day, it turns out to be true, and there wouldn't be much else to write on the subject except...

Here's where the mariachi band begins to play- what a rythym!

In describing their new service, Google mentioned that the free emails would carry AdWords ads, much the way their AdSense program feeds ads to participating web sites, today.  On the surface, this doesn't sound like much - just "Sure, its free email, and they're going to put ads on them to pay for the service".

Let's look at that a little closer, because I think this can have a lot of implications.

In the AdSense program, the same AdWords ads that show in their search engine on a pay-per-click (PPC) basis are also shown on participating websites, and Google pays the website owner a portion of the click-thru price.  With GMail, Google will also be distrubuting Adwords ads (broader reach for your PPC ads), except they won't have to pay an AdSense partner.

Free email services have always been pretty easy to give away, so they won't have much trouble finding people willing to send your AdWords ads in their email - and it's conceivable (even probable) that each view of a given email could serve a different set of contextual ads.  

For instance, if your AdWords ad isn't ranked very high this week, and an email is received by a GMail user, your ad may not show.  But of course you are monitoring your ad campaign and realize that you need to tweak it a little - so you do.  Next week, the GMail user retrieves that same email and because of your higher ranking, he sees your ad.

GMAil won't solve the world's spam problem, but spammers won't want to include a competitor's ad in their spam message.  Since placement of the ads in GMail will be context sensitive, that is exactly what would happen.  I doubt the spammers are going to rush out and get themselves a free GMail account.

Their AdWords customers will get more contextual views (even if less responsive).

When Google Adwords was first released, the ads were only shown on search results, so the number of impressions was limited to the number of times someone searched on your keyword phrases.  Then they extended the reach with the AdSense program so that visitors to participating websites, specializing in your niche would also see your AdWords ad on those sites.  They call this "content targeting".  

The result... a broader reach for your ad, and more click-thrus to your sales page.  

With GMail, the reach of your AdWords ad is extended even further.  Google has also made agreements with certain opt-in publishers to have AdWords ads shown in their newsletters.  Still more eyes for your ads!

I think it could take some time before we see/feel/digest the full impact, but I just had a look at my AdWords campaign for an opt-in to a free eCourse.  You might want to look closely at yours, too.

This campaign has been running since September of last year with a 1% - 1.4% Click-Thru-Rate (CTR), and I check it about twice a month.  The overall CTR on the 1st of April, had jumped to 2.6% (it's a good thing I've got a daily spend limit on it)!

Was this all from new content targeted exposure (newsletters, gmail, etc.)?  I dug a little deeper.  Here's what I found.

Last month's CTR was 1.4% search engine, and .5% for content targeted impressions.  On the 1st of April, the CTR was 3.1% for search engine and 1.6% for content targeted impressions.

Content targeted CTR for that one day was QUADRUPLE my average, and actually exceeded my average search engine CTR.  Search engine impressions should be very targeted, and that's reflected in the fact that my search engine CTR has always been about 3 times my content targeted CTR.  I suspect you've seen similar ratios.

Now extending our reach by including opt-in newsletters and emails should result in more impressions, but should it also affect the click-thru RATE?  Only if the viewers are more responsive than the viewers of the previous content!

I can only think of two reasons for the higher responsiveness.  First is that the new viewers haven't seen these ads before, so they click out of curiousity. Second, is because of better placement, and that says that at least some (probably large) percentage of AdSense publishers are virtually hiding the ads.

Either way, there should be some extra money to be made (at least short term) by AdWords advertisers, provided their ads are ranked high, and their sales copy on the landing page sells.

In the "for what it's worth" column...
I was concerned that this was just a "blip", so I went back day by day, to the middle of March.  What I found was a steady increase in both CTR figures beginning a little over a week before Google's announcement of these changes.  It stands to reason that Google would have been testing this for some time before the announcement.  

Maybe it's just a blip, and it'll only last another week - or maybe it's a change that will have longer term implications and the steady increase in CTR will reach a plateau and hover at a new, higher level for a long time.  Either way, a close look at your own AdWords campaigns is in order.