Google is search, right? Well, before they got into tv, radio and print, they were also ‘not search’. They were, well ‘seek’. In other words, rather than wait for the user to search for you, you would ‘seek out’ the user. This is popularly known as contextual advertising.
This is the area between search advertising and traditional online advertising. When it was launched (with AdSense publishers in 2003), it was based on the Google algorithm which compared ad content with publisher site content and tried to make a match based on how closely the two appeared to be related. To make up for the difference in relevancy and proximity to actual conversion (search being deemed much closer to the desired action than content), Google implemented Smart Pricing. This adjusted the CPC for contextual downward in proportion to the click value based on Google’s calculations.
The reality is there are a lot of content players today. MSN / Live and Yahoo! are have their versions. Quigo has Ad Sonar, Vibrant Media, Pulse 360 (Kanoodle) and more are out there. Unfortunately, since Google launched the contextual advertising rocket, there have been different and not so well related notions of contextual advertising. Randy Schwartz covered this a couple of years ago, outlining four types. His types make sense. However, I am not so sure that I accept that these are all indeed contextual advertising.
In my mind, contextual looks at the context, or content, of the page and then based on that decides if the ad is appropriate. This is different than picking a site about a general subject matter. For instance, if I sell baseball equipment, I’d rather run on a news article page about the home town baseball team (even if the page itself is under the subject local news), than on a sports site’s page about the Stanley Cup Playoffs. This is the difference between content / context and subject / category targeting. I make this point to lend context (no pun intended) to what follows.
Type of Contextual Advertising
Algorithmically based: The first, and in my opinion only true, contextual advertising method is that based on the actual CONTENT of the page. In this method, the algorithm looks at all that is on the page, looks at your ad content (landing page too, if done right) and decides if there is a match. In the more advanced methods, the algorithm looks for negative associations and does not deliver your ad (ie a car ad on a page about automotive recalls).
Keyword Based: Another, and in my mind poor, method is inline contextual (contextual being something of a misnomer) keyword based. It looks for keywords in the body of a page, creates a hyper link on the keyword and then either displays your ad on the mouse over with a hyperlink or sets a hyperlink though to your page. I have seen words highlighted for products that were in fact related to the word, but had absolutely nothing to do with the page content (car filters linked to room air filter, Home entertainment content linked to CA (B2B IT) based on the word ‘Clarity’).
Category Based: Advertising is base simply by selecting content categories (like finance, automotive, sports, etc) on which your ad will appear. While the content may be relevant, this is just like everything else we’ve done online. Select your target audience, find what sites they like (or types of sites), and advertise there (okay, over simplification, but you get the point). Google set this up (properly) as site targeting, rather than contextual advertising. Others are pushing this as contextual advertising. The problem is your ads always appear regardless of the strength of the connection.
Behavioral Based: This has somewhat been taken away from content and spawned a category unto itself as it should be. I won’t elaborate – its just behavioral targeting, or BT.
The recommendations for Managing Contextual Ads are based on the algorithmically based method. The others have a place, but they are not really contextually based in the pure sense of the idea.
Recommendation =>
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