Display Advertising – Contextual, Behavioral, Targeted.

What is Contextual Targeting (Advertising)?

Contextual targeting, in the PPC world, is a process that selects ad placements in the Display Network based on keywords, topics and other factors.
Google AdSense is one of the most well-known examples of contextual advertising. Google’s robots will offer advertisements that are relevant to your users automatically.
AdSense may display contextual advertisements to buy movie tickets or join up for a movie streaming service if you operate a movie review site, for example.
The ads are chosen from a pool of marketers that have signed up for Google Ads.

Contextual Targeting (Advertising)

How does it work?

First, Google Ads figures out what the core theme is around your website by analyzing your content.
Your content is then matched against keywords, selected topics, location, browsing habits and many other factors.

Getting Started with Contextual Targeting

As you can see, contextual targeting allows for hyper-personalized advertising.
By selecting specific topics and pairing them with the content on your website, your ads are likely to appear on relevant publications, blogs and websites.

Here’s how the process works:

Select your keywords and topics:

Start by simply adding target keywords and topics to your Display Network ad groups. These topics allow you to focus on broader themes, which you’ll understand more of shortly.

Google Ads analyses potential placements:

This is to figure out which websites are most relevant to your targeting settings. To do this, Google analyzes the text, language, page structure and internal links on each website.

Google Ads selects placements depending on the type of targeting you’ve opted for:

Content keywords:

Your ad gets placed when your target keywords match a website/publication’s central theme.
For example, let’s say you run an ad to sell a new brand of coffee, targeting keywords like “ethically sourced coffee.” Google Ads would target relevant, individual pages to place your ad.

Topic:

Your ad is placed on a website when it matches the general theme of your chosen topic.
Using the coffee example above, Google will place ads on websites that have a heavy focus on coffee.
This is the most basic form of contextual advertising, but it goes far deeper than that.
Let’s look at two other powerful methods of contextual targeting: behavioral and native advertising.

Behavioral Advertising

We’ve talked about targeting through contextual keywords and topics. But there’s another powerful method of targeting your audience through display ads: behavioral advertising.
Behavioral advertising is where you serve your ads to users based on their online behaviors.
This can include:

By collecting this data, a user persona is created that paints a broader picture of the individual’s browsing habits.
Users with similar behaviors can be grouped together into the same pot, which we call segments.

Native advertising:

Native advertising is a type of contextual advertising in which sponsored adverts are meant to seem as if they are part of the website’s native content. (This is sometimes considered fraudulent advertising.)

How Websites Track Their Users

In order to serve the right ads, websites need to first track this behavioral data. There are several ways that webmasters can do this, but the two most common methods are:

HTTP Requests:

A piece of javascript, or “tracking pixel,” sends information about the user to the ad platform (Google Ads, Facebook Ads etc.). Each user is then identified using a cookie, which is placed on the user’s local computer.

Flash Cookies:

Similar to the cookies mentioned above, only they continue to run even when the user has closed the browser. They can also store more information, up to 100kb (while standard cookies can only store up to 4kb).

How to Use Behavioral Tracking to Re-target Customers & Users?

Using this behavioral data, you can then serve ads across various networks related to the content, products and pages that users viewed on your website.
For example, when someone browses a specific brand of shoe a clothing website, you can serve ads related to that exact product to entice them back and make a purchase.
Let’s focus on the two most popular advertising networks: Google Display Ads and Facebook Ads. In Google Ads, you’ll need to create new audiences. To do this, you must create a re-marketing list.

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