Benefits and limitations of Contextual Advertising
What is Contextual Advertising?
Contextual advertising is a kind of internet advertising that is most often associated with content-based websites.
Contextual advertising displays advertisements relevant to the page’s real content. To begin, a contextual advertising system searches a webpage’s content for keyword terms. The technology then returns relevant, tailored advertisements depending on the material being seen. If someone visits a page on art supplies, they will see advertisements for art suppliers, painting merchants, and online art museums, among others.
In a nutshell, it is a form of online advertising where your ads appear on relevant websites and in specific situations. For instance, when you search for something, like the example, “online web hosting”, the website hosting results you see, are mostly, in the form of advertisements.
Contextual ads appear as:
- Separate ads that are placed in specific areas of the page
- Inline or in-text contextual ads
How does Contextual Ad Work?
Well, first of all, you should make sure to include a contextual advertisement code, or, an HTML code on your website. This allows your ad to appear in the form of a banner, box, etc. But, there are other ways too, as we will show you, how to make contextual advertising even more effective.
After you have put in the code, you will need to have an account with a third-party provider, which connects the contextual advertising network with your website.
For instance, when you search for an online web host, Google will be showing you their ads on a lot of websites. They have a great contextual advertising network which makes a lot of websites show their ads.
Sponsored links ads
Typically, they are text-based advertisements that include links to connected websites. The website owner can specify the position of contextual advertisements on his or her website. Your advertisement will appear in a box labelled “sponsored links.” To conduct contextual advertising, you will need to utilise the services of pay-per-click search engines. Google AdWords and AdSense have promoted this format.
Inline ads
The ads that you see in the middle of a web page are called inline ads. If you’re looking at a page with one such ad, there’s only one copy of the ad displayed on the page. But if you’re looking at a page with a number of such ads, each of the ads will be displayed on a separate line.
The purpose of inline ads is to get more ad impressions on a page without having to change the page that contains the ad. On a blog, for example, it’s a good idea to have an inline ad. When someone is looking at a blog post and sees that there’s an inline ad at the bottom of the page, the person is more likely to click on that ad than to just scroll down to the bottom of the page.
The advantages of contextual advertising
Contextual advertising is a very effective form of advertising, in any industry. People are more likely to buy things they are interested in if they see relevant ads, or, advertisements for that matter, in their browser or the page they are looking at.
- You get to reach only those people who are already looking for that information or related information
- You pay only if anybody clicks on your link
- Such links don’t annoy people
- If the information you provide is good, the user gets delighted.
Disadvantages of contextual advertising
- It distracts people away from the content they want to read
- If the location of the ad is between the content, then people might get annoyed
- Such ads have become so common that web users have started ignoring them
- Your competitors’ ads might get placed along with your ads
- Serious users who are looking for information generally do not click on ads
