Promise Media

The ability to place a targeted ad within the context of the surrounding content is one definition of contextual advertising. This article focuses on the publishing side of contextual ads.

In the online world, major contextual advertising networks provide Web site publishers with the ability to place ads on their sites and get paid for people who click on them. Those companies track the content on the page where the ad appears and displays an ad with a subject related to the content.

Here is a contextual advertising example:

A travel Web site has an article about vacationing in Paris, France. The contextual ads that appear on the page with the article are also about vacationing in Paris. They might be hotel listings, major attractions, flight options, etc. The more targeted the content, the more targeted the advertising and the higher the chances that someone will click on the ad.

A number of factors affect the click and revenue performance of a contextual ad.

First, the subject must have high readership and advertiser interest. Travel, health, employment, real estate, automotive and personal finance are among some of the topics that attract heavy advertiser competition, which in turn drives up the rate they are willing to pay to get reader clicks, or cost per click (CPC).

Second, the page and the article must be optimized with certain keywords that allow the ad servers to identify the specific topic and send the best possible ads. The article about Paris vacations might specifically be about ?Paris attractions? for people on vacation there. The phrase ?Paris attractions? should be in the page title, the page meta description, article title (or headline) and in the body text.

Online publishers who display contextual advertising will find that tracking results will focus on the click-through rate, meaning how often people click on the ad, and the revenue per click, which measures the rate that advertisers are willing to pay.

Factors that affect the click-through rate include the location of the ad on the page, the number of ads on the page, the colors used in the ad and how quickly the page loads on a browser. Click-through rates of 2 to 5 percent are well within the norm for contextual advertising compared to 0.2 percent or lower for standard banner ads.

The major factor that affects the revenue per click again is the advertiser competition.

Some publishers rely entirely on generating revenue from the contextual advertising networks, while others use them to fill unsold inventory. Major contextual advertising networks include Google AdSense, Yahoo! Publisher Network, Kontera and Chitika.