Using Adwords To Grow Your Newsletter List – Check This Out

When I was setting up Wednesday’s post, which is a review of an awesome media buying and planning tool for media buyers, advertisers and publishers, I came across a new ad extension I hadn’t seen in Google Adwords before.  It is signing up for newsletter lists while doing a search in your PPC ad.  This is a pretty cool ad extension that you can run and could be extremely beneficial for you, as well as have some downsides you should think about.

What’s great about this new ad extension is that you can grow your newsletter list from it.  This is great for a ton of reasons.

• You can get the email address of a person who has an interest in your product or site, even if they don’t click through or shop.
• If they sign up from the ad extension then you can remarket back to them over and over, even if they never went to your site first or shopped.
• You can grow a targeted newsletter list fast based on Google search volumes as well as divide it up by:
  • Search terms or interests
  • Regions or geography and interest if you are using geotargetting
  • Mobile, Desktop, Tablet, etc… depending on your campaign settings to target people who have smart phones, tablets or computers.  (This helps you to figure out demographics and products to push.)
  • Plus many more of the ways you can target traffic using Google Adwords.

This new feature in Google is a great way for Marketers to build a newsletter fast and easy, however it does lack a few major things that could help you and there are a few potential issues with building a newsletter list this way.

• If the person signs up from a newsletter sign up but doesn’t pay attention to the url or site they are subscribing to, they could forgot or not realize they signed up with you which could cause them to hit their spam buttons.  This can potentially hurt your deliverability in the long run.
• I don’t see it saying opt in or what the person is opting in to.  I don’t know if that is 100% can spam compliant, but it appears it may be if Google is doing it.  I would consult your general counsel before trying this.  (I am not a lawyer and cannot give any legal advice so this is just an opinion.)
• You are not able to actually say what the person is signing up for or to encourage the sign up.   However, you can use your ad to describe the list like sign up for newsletter to receive coupons, deals or discounts, etc…  It would sort of defeat the purpose of the ad if you are trying to generate sales, but could help to grow your newsletter list if that is your goal.
• It looks like you are very limited to gain anything that would be on your normal newsletter or email list on the sign up page like:
  • Name
  • Last Name
  • Address
  • Interests
  • Etc…

I’m actually excited to try this with one of my clients but need to get their approval first.  Their site is very similar to the coupon site above so for very relevant terms it could be a great tool.  The person is looking for coupons and a coupon newsletter would make sense.  If you have a specific search term to a retailer or url that is an obvious service, then this could make sense for certain campaigns as well.  I’m actually pretty excited for the tool even though there are a few downsides and if you have used it or tried it out, please feel free to leave a comment below.  Also feel free to comment if you can think of other ways to use this new ad extension to make money by using Google Adwords and the newsletter sign up additional or ad extension.  I haven’t tried to set it up yet so if you know of an easy way or if you can actually add in a way to add words, etc… above it, please feel free to share below.