The Four Types of Contextual Advertising
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Written By Reprise Media | August 25, 2005 | Share This
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Although it’s easy to divide online advertising into the categories of search and contextual, the distinctions are much more complex. In this article Reprise Media Director of Strategic Development, Randy Schwartz further breaks down contextual advertising into four types: search-based contextual; channel-based contextual; Behaviorally-Based Contextual; and In-Line Advertising. The following article may change the way you think about contextual…
It’s no great revelation that contextual advertising helps marketers reach users who may be more in a browsing or surfing mode, whereas search is far more direct. They’re less goal-oriented, a notion you’ll find reflected in your campaign metrics (contextual often doesn’t return the same results as search for ROI-based media). This is because there’s a wider gap in the timeliness and attentiveness of the audience that’s being exposed to these advertisements and a greater presumptiveness in those advertisements being served.
Still, there’s no doubt that contextual can be highly effective in achieving more general messaging and brand exposure goals. The following is a list of four types of contextual advertising and the implications of each. This list is not exhaustive, but should serve as a starting point for businesses looking to deepen their knowledge and understanding of this medium, and the discrepancy between these SEM products.
1. Search-based Contextual
This type if exemplified by Google’s AdSense program. We believe this is one of the best types of contextual. Even though the advertisement is essentially ‘forced’ on the user, this type of contextual program allows the advertiser to target content inclusive of very specific verbiage. The more specific the verbiage, the more likely you can control the focus of your ad environment.
Google AdSense and the Yahoo! Publisher Network are especially useful in their potential for corporate communications and outreach programs.
SEM can provide a solution to PR challenges, either by expanding the reach of current efforts or by fostering a greater acceptance of outbound media messages.
2. Channel-Based Contextual
This type of advertising is similar to the ad networks created by Kanoodle and Valueclick. These networks offer broad coverage of the web: Valueclick reaches over 40% of the web audience through premium partners like iVillage, About.com, Autotrader and Switchboard. Kanoodle’s contextual program carries a high composition of traffic across CBS Marketwatch and MSNBC.
These networks bear a greater likeness to the banner ad-networks of old, as with Latitude90 and Doubleclick Sonar. Keyword lists are largely irrelevant as the network will target channels and sub-channels that greatly diminish the precision of your customer profile or targeting intent.
Channel-based contextual can be extremely helpful in allowing a brand-based client to extend its reach across a web of content associated with a certain behavioral profile (making this the closest parallel to the demographic planning of traditional media).
This will prove to be a high growth segment of CPC advertising, as the networks find ways to monetize the 95% non-search-based pages of the web. That they’re channel-based allows them to better control and leverage their inventories and they’re further offering convergence between text ads and banner ads (simply recognizing the ad space being sold). These networks should be able to draw more brand-based advertising money online.
Finally, to further diversify their services, the channel-based contextual players are offering add-on premiums like geo-targeting, pay-per-call, occasionally even day-parting. These premiums stand to add volume to overall revenues.
3. Behaviorally-Based Contextual
Here, the network veers away from the background content and builds user-based profiles based on a user’s behavior across a network. There will be more resistance to this form of contextual advertising, as the advertiser can’t see anything that plays into their targeting, and has little chance of accessing their ad on demand. On the other hand, it brings parallels to traditional media planning tools like @Plan that base an audience’s likelihood to buy something on whether they’ve exacted actionable responses to consumer values within the past few months.
For example, for a mortgage lender, the fact that a user’s browsed mortgage content, used calculators and filed requests for more information within the past 6 months might carry far more credibility than any keyword or content association in real-time.
This technology, offered by players like Tacoda and Blue Lithium, will typically leverage inventories across a narrow network of premiere publishers using their technology for in-house profiling and ad-sales.
The hope of this form of contextual advertising is that advertisers can move into territories familiar to direct-marketing houses, taking into account issues of user latency, whereby users are in their information-gathering cycle, and possibly charging a premium for the freshness of each lead (such as targeting them within 48 hours of their filling out a request for information). These players and the structure of their service may lead directly into lead generation and CPA deals.
4. In-Line Advertising
This is one of the most often maligned forms of contextual advertising and often the most intrusive. In-line advertising is developed by companies like Vibrant Media and a lot of advertisers are reluctant to work with these roll-over ads on the presumption that users are still unfamiliar and taken off-guard by the ads that arise as they innocently scroll over content. You may or may not include the Claria-types of download applications within this category
Still, these companies have shown very compelling user studies (granted, of limited samplings) that suggest a number of users understand how the advertising works, when to recognize its presence, and if given the option to disable it, will choose not to do so.
In conclusion, contextual advertising is a rich and varied field. Knowing the differences across contextual ad types can help marketers more effectively leverage this medium for their campaigns, and quite possibly deal with the exponential increase in sales calls you’ll receive from players which seem to be popping up every hour.
Topics: Advertising: Contextual |
I think this summary epitomizes the problem with contextual advertising - there is no industry-wide definition of what it is. The article is comparing apples and oranges - the ‘how’ versus the ‘when’. Conextual advertising is matching the page of content with that of the ad. It’s not HOW the ad is displayed (pop-ups, inline, etc.), it’s WHEN it’s displayed - hopefully at the most appropriate time to the reader.
Thought you wrote this article some time ago I found it very interesting! Thanks.
Do you know any recent studie that compares CTR for search-based advertisement and CTR for contextual advertisement?
Very informative!!A good read.
I found this article very intersting, in which types of advertising are mentioned, its gud to read.
I think the when and the how are both interesting and important.
I also think contextual is only useful when you think of the motivation as well.
Ads that solve my problem are worth 100 times more than ads that are related to my problem.
You can talk about it here;
http://www.tangler.com/group/6700/topic/11882
Mick
I think the when and the how are both interesting and important.
I also think contextual is only useful when you think of the motivation as well.
Ads that solve my problem are worth 100 times more than ads that are related to my problem.
You can talk about it here;
http://www.tangler.com/group/6700/topic/11882
Mick