What Is Contextual Targeting?

Prefer to read? Jump to the video transcript ↓

Contextual targeting is the deployment of web crawlers, machine learning, algorithms, and data scientist with the objective of letting web browsing behavior indicate what a user is interested in.

We like this for our campaigns for three key reasons:

The targeting is always being updated
There is vast amount of inventory that is catalogued
Because there is so much available and updated inventory the data costs are low, especially given the really strong return on ad spend that is generated from contextual targeting campaigns

Companies in the space, including DoubleVerify, Integral Ad Science, Peer 39, Grapeshot, and Moat, all have their own unique take on how to make contextual targeting work for an advertiser.

Further, they all end up deploying similar types of functionality, of course with some variation.

Their tools allow advertisers the precision targeting opportunities based on the keywords on pages, targeting individual domains, and targeting individual URLs.

The key question that advertisers need to answer to take advantage of contextual targeting is to ask what pages, sites, keywords, or apps, is a user on that indicates that a person is the right customer.

If there’s an ad supported place on the web with this type of information, chances are that contextual targeting will allow you to surround users who are browsing for your brand, product, or service.

We use these tools to do keyword and URL based targeting. For example, an advertiser like Ghirardeli who sells caramel, can have their ads appear only on apple pie recipe pages that feature caramel as an ingredient.

In addition to contextual ad targeting these companies provide a slew of other capabilities including brand safety, in-view targeting, video player targeting, and weather targeting.

Most of these tools are available as a turnkey solution in demand side platforms, and so they require just a few clicks to get really powerful ad targeting from them.

From a brand safety perspective we help clients determine how to limit exposure to content that doesn’t align with their brand values. For example, a financial advertiser probably won’t want to run ads on pages that feature negative financial news.

The future for contextual targeting will be strong because more advertisers are looking at content and context as a valuable signal for their ad targeting, especially as technology companies and legal frameworks limit consumer tracking data from being collected.

Video Transcript: What Is Contextual Targeting?

Hey, hey, today we're going to talk briefly about contextual targeting. Contextual targeting is a really interesting way of running ads, and it's based on the context and content of a page. I bet you may not have realized that when an article is posted on a page, and let's say the article is about hamburgers, the best hamburgers in Los Angeles, so maybe the article features Fuddruckers and Five Guys and maybe Doghouse.

So let's say that the article is about hamburgers. There are different companies, Double Verify, Integral Ad Sciences, etc., who are tracking the content of the page. They read the context and the content of the page, and they understand that the page is actually about hamburgers.

And so when that type of targeting happens, we can target ads to pages based on the content that exists on that page. And we can go even further. Let's say our advertiser is Five Guys Hamburgers.

They want to serve ads whenever someone is thinking about a more premium hamburger in Los Angeles. Then any time a page, let's say USA Today or Forbes or a food blog has a reference to its competitors, let's say Doghouse as an example, we can then say we're going to, or Fuddruckers as another example, we can then say we're going to serve ads on pages that contain reference to the competitors that we define. So it's a custom keyword targeting list.

And what we do is we go into a tool called Grapeshot, which has been bought by Oracle. We can go in, we can say we only want to serve ads when a specific keyword target appears on the page. So in this case, example, Fuddruckers and Doghouse.

So this is one form of keyword targeting. There's generic categories that exist, so like food and DIY, so do-it-yourself, or home, or things like comics, or banking, or financial advice. Those are generic existing contextual categories.

Or we can drill down into more customized categories based on when keywords appear on the page. So the use case of that is really when we understand where we want our ads appear, because the signal that we're looking for is to identify a person, a user, based on the content of the page. We know that a person who's on a page about Doghouse or Fuddruckers may also be interested in eating a hamburger.

So as a result, we want to show them an ad for, let's say, Five Guys hamburgers. That's one way of targeting users. Another form of contextual targeting is site lists.

So site lists means serving ads on a particular set of sites that are contextually relevant. So for example, a small business in Los Angeles may want to appear on all the local news sites. So it's like abc7.com, nbclosangeles.com, latimes.com.

All of those properties can be aggregated into a targeting list. And our ads, if they're going to appear, they're only going to appear on that white list of properties. So those are two examples, contextual categories and white lists of contextual targeting that is being deployed in 2020.

I hope this was helpful. Talk to you guys soon. Have a great weekend.

What Is Contextual Targeting?

What Is Contextual Targeting?

Video Transcript: What Is Contextual Targeting?

Supercharge Your Media Buying Today

Contact