This method is incredible powerful because of how targeted it is. When Google displays advertisements in Gmail, it displays them based on the content of a users Gmail email message. That means that you can show your advertisement the moment that someone is ‘thinking’ about a particular topic.

This gives you the opportunity to show your ad the moment your target audience is discussing the need for that particular product/service.

How Can I Use Gmail Advertising?

First things first you need to change the way you go about selecting ‘keywords’ to advertise on. In fact you don’t really want to focus so much on keywords (at least not in the sense you are used to), rather you should
be thinking about how people write emails. Writing emails is much more conversational than typing in a search query.

When someone is writing an email they are communicating with someone – they are expressing their fears, desires, wants, likes, dislikes all in their email. The user is going to type out their THOUGHTS. And this is key.

You really need to think about how people write their thoughts when they are talking to someone via email. For example maybe you want to lose weight. You might be emailing a friend telling her that you “gained weight over the holidays” or that “I need to drop a few pounds” or “I need to get in better shape”…these are all “conversation phrases” or thought queries, they aren’t necessarily keywords that you would advertise on if you were using the Google search network.