Contextual Ads Captive Readers in the Twinkle of an Eye

by Monica Di Santi

July 12, 2024

You've decided to run paid ads online to spark your business a bit, bring attention to a new launch or simple boost your sales.

That's great!

What type of ads will you use?

Online, the most common ones are search advertising, social media advertising, mobile advertising and product placement.

Up to now, most ad publishers determine ad placement based on past users' behavior and the use of cookies.

But...

That's about to change for ever.

Yes. There's an ad revolution on the make.

People's concern about their online privacy and extensive ad blocker usage is triggering a new way of advertising method.

Contextual advertising.

What is Contextual Advertising?

Contextual advertising is the strategy to place ads based on the content of the page where the ad is displayed, without relying on personal information provided by third party cookies.

Isn't it awesome?

No more web tracking!

Can you believe it?

Contextual advertising rises because advertisers have to reach their potential customers in a customized way without breaching users’ privacy.

So, taking into account the content they’re consuming, ads connected with the topic are displayed there.

Contextual advertising catch readers’ attention when their interest is at its highest peak and persuade them to buy then and there.

What has Triggered the Arrival of Contextual Advertising?

People have been concerned about their privacy for a long time.

Companies gather lots of personal information, including age, job, browsing history, messages, emails, and use that information in their own benefit to present you with a compelling digital ad.

On the other hand, a good level of privacy puts people in control and they choose what kind of information they want to disclose online, minimize personal identity theft and misuse.

So, web browser companies started to put a stop to the intruding 3rd party cookies a few years ago.

Mozilla Firefox, Apple’s Safari and Brave Browser have already put into practice an anti-tracking policy, and stop advertisers from tracking users across websites.

Now, Google plans to disable 3rd party cookies during 2024.

They started on Jan 2024 with 1 % of users and plan to reach 100% of cookie users by the end of the year.

Under this new trend, individual information won’t be available but contextual advertising is considered one of the best solutions available.

This implies that ads based on past consumers’ behavior are threatened, and publishers consider contextual advertising a good choice to go on with their business digital promotion.

What are Third-party Cookies?

Cookies are coding scripts generated by a server and sent to your browser when you visit a website to collect data.

These cookies stay there for a period of time, and recognizes you when you return, storing more data about you such as IP, your journey on the web and much more.

A third party cookie is a site tag that doesn’t belong to the website you’re visiting. They are placed there via an ad or other object.

The third-party cookies let advertisers track user’s activity on the web and be more effective in their ad display to their potential customers.

Is Contextual Advertising Effective?

The rise of contextual advertising has a great impact among publishers and advertisers as they won’t be able to get access to people’s personal information. They’ll have to rely only on the page content.

According to research, contextual ads are quite effective.

69% of readers would feel more inclined to pay attention to an ad related to their preferences.

44% of people have started to consume a new brand that was presented to them associated with content they love.

The great benefit of contextual advertising is that readers are already focus on a topic, making them more receptive to contextual ads displayed.

• Help readers get more options to buy from. When customers are sightseeing online, the system present them with similar products but with slight different prices, colors, qualities. They certainly are in front of a several choices.

• Increase the probability of purchase As customers are already hooked on that topic and they are looking for the best solution to their need, they are more prone to buy on the spot.

• Works via different channels No matter what platform the potential customers are, they are already engaged in that topic. It belongs to their world of preference or an actual need they are going through.

Contextual Advertising Example

While I was looking for a book that will be published in the near future, this kind of advertising was offered to me. As you see, a set of six books were display and all of them shared the same feature. They can be pre-ordered.

How to Run Contextual targeted Campaigns

As with any campaign you want to run you have to check some important items before starting.

• Set campaign goal: Define what you want to achieve with your campaign. Be specific. Generate 65new leads per month.

• Define your budget: Define how much money you want to spend.

• Describe your target audience: Have a close look at your audience demographics, needs and desires.

• Create a campaign concept: A concept campaign is an idea that makes your ads resonate with your audience. If you create an ad campaign about Christmas, the concept may be love and the importance of family reunion on that day.

• Make a list of relevant keywords: To be successful you have to define the kind of keywords that work for your campaign.

• Create your assets: These are the elements you'll use in your campaign such as videos, content, pictures, etc.

• Choose your channel distributions: You have to choose a platform to run your ads according to your convenience.

Contextual Targeting Ads

With all the previous information you already had, you're ready to create a successful contextual ad campaign.

They may turn up on connected TV, mobile apps, YouTube.

• Define the topic: You should describe it without including references to the audience.

• Produce keywords: make a list of keywords closely connected to the topic at hand. You need between 5 to 50 keywords for your ad group. Add negative keywords to avoid undesired ad placement.

• Write your ad: Start with a compelling headline,type a strong description and include your call to action together with a link to your website.Import a relevant picture if you want to enhance your ad.

• Set up your budget: This spending plan determine the highest amount of money you're willing to pay for each click on your ad for a keyword and position display.

• Track results: Use the tools the platform offers you to track results.

• Optimize: Based on your monthly results you can tweak your keywords to get a better result.

Conclusion

A new era of respectful and privacy-friendly advertising is beginning. This way customers are able to enjoy the ads presented to them, enhancing their experience without threats.