With third-party cookies on their way out, many advertisers are turning to contextual targeting in order to best target their advertising campaigns and get a good ROI in the process.
But what is contextual targeting? How is it done? And finally, how effective is contextual targeting?
Let’s take a look.
Quick Links
What is contextual targeting?
Contextual targeting is the idea that you can target a user even when you can’t identify their past behaviors and interests, and it’s done by looking at the context in which they are looking at a webpage.
Third-party cookies were good because they allowed for behavioral targeting, as the cookies were able to track which websites a user was visiting, allowing for precise targeting based on a users behaviors and interests.
With these becoming increasingly unavailable, contextual targeting is the next best alternative.
With contextual targeting, rather than identifying the user, you’re instead looking at the website the user is looking at to try to infer what advertising would be effective.
A good example of this might be placing an ad for a sports clothes shop on a sports website, or placing an ad for kitchen utensils on a webpage showing a recipe.
How is contextual advertising done?
There are two main ways contextual advertising is performed: contextual category targeting and/or contextual keyword targeting.
Let’s take a look at each.
Contextual category targeting
Contextual category targeting is when you use the category of the page to determine whether an ad should be served.
The content of the webpage is analysed, and the information collected is used to determine which category the website belongs to.
The purpose of this is to allow advertisers to serve ads only on sites that are categorically relevant to their business or product.
The list of categories a website and/or individual webpage can be categorized into are the IAB categories, which can be found here.
These categories can vary from very broad (like Automotive) or very niche, such as Road-Side Assistance.
Contextual category targeting example
A good example of contextual category targeting in action can be seen in the screenshot below.
As you can see, this is a blog post all about great things to do in Siem Reap, which is a city in Cambodia.
We know from the context of this webpage that the people reading this blog post are interested in travel, likely have both the money and desire to travel, and are likely looking for inspiration on where to travel abroad.
So Wizz Air, a low-cost airline provider, has recognised this through the category of the webpage (IAB20: Travel), and has used contextual category targeting to place a relevant ad on the site.
In this case, the ad is advertising cheap flights to various countries, in the hope of enticing those readers of the blog that are looking for inspiration to click through and find a destination to go to through Wizz Air.
Simple, yet effective.
Advantages of contextual category targeting
It’s easy to implement
Contextual category targeting is very easy to implement, as you don’t need any prior data on a user to begin placing your ads.
You simply choose the category you are looking to target, and when a user visits one of those sites and that site runs ads, you can bid to place your ad on the page and in front of the user.
Simple!
It’s cheap to implement
Not only does the fact you don’t need any historic data make contextual category targeting easy to implement, but it also makes it cheap to implement.
Gaining access to data on users can be expensive, whether its done through making deals with publishers to implement some form of tracking on their sites to gather user data, or whether it’s from paying third-party providers to license/use their data for your advertising.
Either way, it’s a lot cheaper to use the real-time contextual category of the site to display your ads.
There’s no privacy concerns
Unlike behavioral targeting, with contextual category targeting there are no provacy concerns.
This is because you’re not tracking anyone, nor are you discreetly trying to use their data to inform your advertising.
Instead, you’re waiting until a webpage with ads loads, you’re seeing what category that webpage falls under, and if it’s a category you’re looking to target you will bid to place your ad there.
It doesn’t get more privacy-centric than that!
Disadvantages of contextual category targeting
You need to choose the right categories to target
Targeting the wrong categories can cause users to see ads for things they don’t want to see and/or just are not interested in, which can lead to frustration with the advertisers’ brand or product.
For example, showing an ad for a Jeep on a Porsche owners forum – yes the category is Automotive, but users of a Porsche owners forum are interested in luxury sports car brands like Porsche, not 4×4 car brands like Jeep.
You risk making your targeting too narrow
The other risk with contextual category targeting is that by only choosing to target categories you know are highly relevant to your business or product, you risk making the pool of people who can see your ad too small to be effective.
It may also cause you to miss out on other indirect categories that the advertiser is unaware may be relevant – like if sports fans also could be reached through the News category (because they’re looking at sports news), but the advertiser is only targeting the Sports category.
Contextual keyword targeting
While contextual category targeting will get you most of the way there in finding the right context in which to place your ads, contextual keyword targeting will take you that little bit further.
The idea behind contextual keyword targeting is that you are targeting sites based on the keywords appearing on individual webpages and websites.
So rather than the whole webpage or website being categorized and then you target the category, instead you’re targeting the keywords appearing on a webpage.
This helps to ensure that your ads are serving to users with an already established interest in your ads message, as you can directly target those keywords that are hyper-relevant to your ad.
Advantages of contextual keyword targeting
Higher CTR than contextual category targeting
According to Choozle, contextual keyword targeting has a CTR (click-through rate) roughly 3x that of contextual category targeting.
This is because you can get a lot more niche and specific than even the most granular category targeting allows, meaning your ads can be far more relevant to the user seeing them.
There’s no privacy concerns
Just like contextual category targeting, contextual keyword targeting does not use any user data to inform targeting decisions, so there are no privacy concerns.
Disadvantages of contextual keyword targeting
Contextual keyword targeting is more expensive
Because contextual keyword targeting allows you to target your ad in such a granular way, the downside of this is that it becomes more expensive to reach fewer and fewer people.
For example, if with contextual category targeting you had a pool of 25,000 people you could reach, with contextual keyword targeting this might only be a pool of 1,000 people.
And because there’s so many less people, there’s so many less opportunities to reach them, so you’ll need to pay a lot more when you have the opportunity to do so.
1 thought on “What is Contextual Targeting? [A Quick Guide]”
Comments are closed.