Contextual Advertising

November 6, 2007 – 9:18 pm

Imagine going to a website devoted to NASCAR. Then imagine seeing ads for Breads and Cookies. Hm…not very relevant. But what if you saw ads for gas and oil products, or for car products. Well that is much more relevant. That is what contextual advertising is all about. It is about targeting  to the specific individual who is visiting the Web site with specific ads based on the content of the website.

It works when a contextual ad system scans a Web site looking for keywords.  It returns ads to the Web page which are based on the subject that the user is viewing. The ads can be popups or placed on the pages. Another use of contextual advertising comes from search engines themselves. When they display the search results they also display context ads based on the search words.

3^rd Party Hyperlinking

The technique known as hyperlinking installs software on a user computer. It interacts with the browser. Links to an advertiser based on keywords are made but they don’t pay the user for the ads provided on the page.

The role of contextual advertising in marketing.

Traditionally, there are three elements identified with online advertising. The first is the creative element. This involves the ad and what it looks like, design, textual message, and so on. The second involves media planning. This identifies where the ad should be placed; where should it run to make the biggest and best impact. The final one is media buying, or paying for the ad. The impact of contextual advertising affects media planning. Normally humans are involved in choosing where to place the ad, but that function is automated with computers and as a result placing ads across 1,000’s of sites.

Here are some companies that provide contextual advertising

PremierAd.com

www.PremierAd.com’s offers opportunities for contextual advertising to both advertisers and publishers. In addition, they offer CPM banners and pops ups specifically designed to help sites build a brand and market products.  They provide publishers with an 80% advertising revenue rate earned from clicks or other impressions generated. Their inventory of products includes Text Banners, Graphic Banners, Pop ups, and XML feeds.

Clicksor.com

At www.clicksor.com contextual advertising is offered with similar features that PremierAd offers. However, in detail they also provide three specialized programs called District that focus their adwork specifically to their clients’ needs.

IntelliTXT

With www.IntelliTXT.com website authors will add script into their site pages. This  calls IntelliTXT  if a viewer scans the page. The script identifies keywords on the page and double underlines the words. When the person reading the web page holds the mouse over the double underlined link, an ad will pop up delivering content associated with that word. Advertisers pay to have their ads associated with particular words.

IntelliTXT  has over 1200 publishers. Big players like Nike, Sony and Microsoft are advertising on the platform.

Kanoodle

On the downside there can be a propensity for fraud, or certainly problems with the way the contextual ad works. www.Kanoodle.com offers the same services that PremierAd.com does, but they had a run in a few years ago with click fraud. At least that is what was reported on Search Engine Journal http://www.searchenginejournal.com/kanoodle-and-click-fraud/2235/. The way Kanoodle generated the traffic was suspect and more than one customer noted the problems. But that was several years ago. More recently, however, there have been no reports of problems.

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