Contextual advertising is text hyperlink ads, the content of which changes depending on the user's request. Such advertisements are placed on search pages and on sites with similar topics. The essence of such advertising is to show advertisements to those people who are potentially interested in viewing them.
The development of contextual advertising began after Bill Gross patented the idea of selling links in 1997. Its essence was in the priority display of relevant advertising links on the search query, and then only the rest of the search results. Both major search engines and site owners liked this idea. Soon, the first site, Goto.com, was created to sell sponsored links. In our country, the first links appeared in Yandex. Another leader of the Russian market, the Begun contextual advertising system, was created in 2002. Some time ago, she entered into an agreement with Google, which is involved in selling advertising links through the Google Adsense system.
Contextual advertising is one of the most advanced types of advertising on the Internet. The user sets specific keywords when searching for information on the network and, together with the list of pages, sees a block of contextual advertising corresponding to the search words. Therefore, the main advantage of such advertising is that it attracts search engine, that is, targeted traffic. Ads will be seen only by people interested in such goods and services.
Other important advantages of contextual advertising:
- small text ads do not annoy users;
- relative cheapness for advertisers;
- the predicted result and the ability to track the expenditure of funds, the effect of advertising can be measured using special tools;
- operational optimization - an advertising campaign is easy to quickly adjust to increase its effectiveness.
Everybody makes money on such advertising - advertisers, site owners, and search engines. The first ones attract customers, webmasters have a certain percentage for each click on advertising installed on their sites, and share the profit with the organizers of contextual advertising. The advertiser pays for clicks.
Contextual ads are search and thematic. Search ads are shown when a user's search query is made.
Thematic contextual advertising is shown on the pages of sites if the subject of the advertisement is close to the interests of the user. Featured ads are shown as additional information to the pages viewed.
Contextual advertising, like all other types of advertising, can pursue such goals as increasing sales, introducing a new service or product to the market, conducting an advertising campaign, and so on. Depending on the goals of the contextual advertising campaign, the placement of ads, their cost, quantity and other parameters may change.
