Contextual advertising is a form of targeted advertising for advertisements appearing on
websites or other media, such as content displayed in mobile browsers.
The advertisements themselves are selected and served by automated systems based on the
content displayed to the user.
How contextual advertising works A contextual advertising system scans the
text of a website for keywords and returns advertisements to the webpage based on those
keywords.
The advertisements 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 advertisements for sports-related companies, such as memorabilia
dealers or ticket sellers.
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 advertising is a form of targeted advertising in which the content of an ad
is in direct correlation to the content of the web page the user is viewing.
For example, if you are visiting a website concerning travelling in Europe and see that
an ad pops up offering a special price on a flight to Italy, that’s contextual advertising.
Contextual advertising is also called “In-Text” advertising or “In-Context” technology.
Apart from that when a visitor doesn't click on the ad in a go through time the ad is automatically
changed to next relevant ad showing the option below of going back to the previous ad.
Service providers Google AdSense was the first major contextual
advertising network.
It works by providing webmasters with JavaScript code that, when inserted into webpages, displays
relevant advertisements from the Google inventory of advertisers.
The relevance is calculated by a separate Google bot, Mediabot, that indexes the content
of a webpage.
Recent technology/service providers have emerged with more sophisticated systems that use language-independent
proximity pattern matching algorithm to increase matching accuracy.
Since the advent of AdSense, Yahoo! Bing Network Contextual Ads, Microsoft adCenter, Advertising.com,
ads.hsoub.com Sponsored Listings and others have been gearing up to make similar offerings.
Impact Contextual advertising has made a major impact
on earnings of many websites.
Because the advertisements are more targeted, they are more likely to be clicked, thus generating
revenue for the owner of the website.
A large part of Google's earnings is from its share of the contextual advertisements
served on the millions of webpages running the AdSense program.
Contextual advertising has attracted some controversy through the use of techniques
such as third-party hyperlinking, where a third-party installs software onto a user's
computer that interacts with the web browser.
Keywords on a webpage are displayed as hyperlinks that lead to advertisers.
This sort of advertising also applies to the airline industry, with more airlines offering
advertisers the opportunity to advertise on their print-at-home boarding passes, itineraries
and confirmation emails.
The company driving this trend is Ink, who work with many airlines to help them generate
additional revenues.
Agency roles There are several advertising agencies that
help brands understand how contextual advertising options affect their advertising plans.
There are three main components to online advertising:
creation — what the advertisement looks like
media planning — where the advertisements are to be run
media buying — how the advertisements are paid for
Contextual advertising replaces the media planning component.
Instead of humans choosing placement options, that function is replaced with computers facilitating
the placement across thousands of websites.
See also Browser security
Advertising network Editorial-related advertising
In-text advertising In-image advertising
Semantic targeting Native advertising
Notes
Further references Ferguson, Renee Boucher.
"A Battle Is Brewing Over Online Behavioral Advertising".
www.eweek.com.
Retrieved 2008-10-20.
Ostrow, Adam.
"When Contextual Advertising Goes Horribly Wrong - Mashable".
mashable.com.
Retrieved 2008-10-20.
"FTC Staff Proposes Online Behavioral Advertising Privacy Principles".
www.ftc.gov.
Retrieved 2008-10-20.
Kenny, D. and Marshall, J..
"Contextual Marketing: The Real Business of the Internet".
Harvard Business Review.
Retrieved 2008-07-22.