Contextual Advertising

Contextual Advertising is a form of targeted advertising for advertisements appearing on websites or as well as other media. The advertisements themselves are selected -and served by automated systems based on the content displayed to the user.

A contextual advertising system scans the text of a website for keywords and returns advertisements to the webpage based on what the user is viewing. These ads may be displayed on the webpage or as pop-up ads. For example, if the user is viewing a website pertaining to sports and that website uses contextual advertising, the user may see ads for sports related companies. Contextual advertising is also used by search engines to display advertisements on their search results pages based on the keywords in the user's query.

Contextual marketing may be viewed as marketing ones product(s) in context to the interests of the customers that one is trying to reach. Over the years, most businesses have evolved so much that they want to receive value for every cent invested. They have even more specialized and defined goals and they want their advertising to reach at the right customers at the right time. This has given rise to contextual marketing and advertising.

For example, you may have the world's best looking most user-friendly website. However, this does not necessarily mean you will also have lots of people visiting it. You need some kind of hook to draw them there and to give them a reason to stay and explore it. This is where contextual marketing comes in. You will have to be willing to invest some money in search engine optimization so that your site is displayed first when a user searches for something in a search engine. This needn't cost a lot mind you. For example, the initial deposit for Pay Per Click (PPC) ad campaign varies between $25 and $50. Some search engines will even provide a small amount of money as a starter bonus.

Contextual marketing works invisibly behind the scenes based on the analysis of content. This enables the user to make the purchase if he wants to, without even leaving the site. It links directly to the site where he can make the purchase.

Proponents of contextual marketing say that it makes Internet marketing much easier. Before, it was much more difficult to target a specific audience with the kind of ads that they wanted to see. Today however, contextual marketing makes it possible for businesses to target a smaller and more defined group according to their buying habits, instead of users just being assaulted with millions of ads most of which have little or no relevance to what interests them.

Google AdSense was the first major contextual advertising program. It provides webmasters with JavaScript code that, when inserted into WebPages displays relevant advertisements from Google's inventory of advertisers. Because the advertisements are more targeted, they are more likely to be clicked, which generates revenue for the owner of the website, as well the server of the ads themselves. A large part of Google's earnings come from its share of the contextual advertisements served on the millions of WebPages that run the AdSense program.