October 7th, 2009 → 8:20 pm @ Richard
Would you like more targeted traffic to your website? Contextual advertising could be the answer you’re looking for, especially if your business targets a specific niche.
It is an online advertising model where relevant ads are displayed on websites or other online media, based on the content that is on that web page. The advertising network searches the page for keywords and then delivers an advertisement that matches those keywords. For example, if you were reading a website about sports – and they use contextual advertisement – then you would only see ads related to sports.
For the advertiser it means that their ads are being displayed on pages related to their products or services. Chances are, if someone is reading that page, they may be interested in that topic – in this case, sports. That increases the chances that they will also be interested in your product or service.
No, pay per click is a model of how you pay for advertising, not how it is displayed. However, in many cases PPC is used alongside contextual ads – for example, Google Adwords and Adsense. When you type something into Google it searches the web and then displays the pages it thinks are most relevant based on the terms you typed in (your keywords). For example, if you type in ‘tropical fish’ it will give you a list of pages that use the term ‘tropical fish’ in order of relevance and importance.
On the right hand side of the results page Google also displays what it calls ‘sponsored results’ – this is Google Adwords and is a perfect example of a contextual ad. The ads that are displayed there are relevant to the keywords that you typed into Google. In this case you would expect to see advertisements related to ‘tropical fish’ – fish tanks, pet shops and the like. Each advertiser chooses the keywords that are appropriate to their advertisements and will only show up when those terms are searched for – i.e. contextual. They only pay however, when someone clicks on that ad – that is PPC.
Google Adwords combines the two – contextual advert and PPC – to great effect and has become one of the world’s largest advertising networks. Adsense is based on the same concept. Adsense allows website publishers to put small bits of code onto their website that deliver Adwords-style ads based on the text that is on the website page. So a page about boxing would have small boxing-related text ads appear on the page. When someone clicks on these ads, the revenue generated is split between Google and the website owner.
Google is certainly not the only advertising network that uses contextual ads and contextual advert does not have to use PPC.
The purpose of contextual advert is simply to make any advertising more relevant to what is on the website. That should mean that advertisers get a better response (and more targeted leads) and customers are not annoyed by irrelevant ads.
We Do It For You: If you’d like help finding a contextual advertising solution to fit your business, Click here for more info about the lead generation services we provide
Do It Yourself: For more lead generation ideas, Download our free report
Return to Lead Generation Techniques
Back to Lead Generation Home
Tags: adsense, Advertising Network, content network, Contextual Advertising, contextual advertising and PPC, Google Adwords, How to Buy Leads, Online Advertising, Pay Per Click Advertising, PPC to Generate Leads, sponsored results, Website Marketing Strategy
