Any advertiser using paid advertising hopes to enhance their marketing effort by being in the right place, at the right time, and with the right content.
However, running paid ads is not always fruitful. Sometimes, it turns out to be a lot of money and time investment without yielding any results.
According to research, 64% of viewers find ads annoying and invasive. Moreover, many people disregard ads online. 45% of people say that they don’t notice online ads anymore, even if they don’t block them.
What is the solution to this problem?
It is Contextual targeting.
Understanding Contextual Targeting
According to recent research, contextually relevant ads increased engagement by 43%. Moreover, individuals recalled contextual advertising 2.2 times better than conventional advertisement methods.
Contextual advertising assists in reaching the right audience at the right time and place, converting them, and enhancing brand ROI. Displaying utensil advertisements in a home décor magazine is a good example of this.
Additionally, while contextual advertising has always been available to marketers as a digital marketing strategy, it has usually been overlooked in favor of identity-based solutions that target advertising based on user activities.
Contextual targeting has witnessed a resurgence in recent years as a result of a number of circumstances, including widespread data deprecation, the implementation of consumer privacy rules, and the abolition of third-party cookies.
Advertisers need a greater choice of options to identify, connect, and engage with their consumers in this new era of ad tech. This makes contextual targeting the most effective targeting approach and allows companies to develop a more comprehensive advertising plan.
Examples Contextual Ads
If you’re reading a movie review site, you could come across advertisements that say things like “buy movie tickets” or “sign up for a movie streaming service.”
You see an advertisement for “shampoo” before watching a YouTube video instruction on “how to trim your hair.”
Instead of using consumer data, Keywords, Topic Targeting, and AI Technology are utilized to scan the website where the visitor is now located. Ads appropriate to the page’s context are then displayed.
Working Procedure of Contextual Targeting
Contextual advertising made use of contextual information to provide advertisements based on the content displayed. It is more concerned with what content is seen than with who sees it.
Marketers may deliver a more relevant and likely to inspire action message by analyzing the content on the page as well as the context or site on which it appears.
Contextual targeting differs from other ad-targeting systems in that it uses page-level data rather than audience data based on third-party cookies.
Contextual Keyword Targeting
Contextual targeting is achieved through the use of keywords and website topics or major themes.
These keywords will determine where your advertising will display.
For example, if you’re running a maternity clothes ad, you may include keywords like “women’s clothing” or “Pregnancy.” Your ad would then only appear on sites that include those keywords.
Negative keywords can also be entered. In this scenario, you may use a negative keyword phrase to ensure that your maternity wear ad does not appear when no one is searching for it.
If you opt to run an ad based entirely on subjects rather than keywords, you may run it again. Going this way implies your ad will be less targeted, have less effect, and get fewer results.
According to Google, each ad group should have between five and fifty keywords. You may use the Google Keyword Tool to assist you in developing your keyword list.
Don’t utilize long-tail keywords to develop your keyword list as you would for organic campaigns. When using paid advertising, you should select shorter, occasionally broader keywords.
Contextual vs Behavioral Targeting
Though the phrases contextual and behavioral advertising appear to be synonymous, they are not.
Behavioral targeting built ad campaigns by exploiting internet user data. This marketing method collects information about potential clients’ web surfing or purchasing habits. Following that, clients are targeted based on their activity.
Contextual targeting, on the other hand, employs an automated method to display advertisements that are directly related to the content of the site and are based on certain keywords.
Unlike behavioral targeting, which shows advertising based on past purchase history, contextual targeting places adverts in areas where potential purchasers may have ended up owing to their browsing activities. This, in turn, serves to boost the product’s ROI and brand recognition.
Final words
Even if you spend a lot of money on paid ads, they may not give the results you want. This, however, is not the case with contextual advertising. Advanced contextual advertising technologies assist in placing ads on the most relevant content to engage the greatest number of users. If your company is still using behavioral advertising strategies, it’s time to transition to contextual advertising. This is because people want to view advertising that they have already searched for and may become irritated if they see them too frequently.
