Contextual advertising matches ads to the content of a webpage, with the aim of encouraging readers to browse related advertising. Google is credited with starting this trend. However, website owners need to consider ad placement and ensure ads are in context with the content. There are also concerns about sensitive content generating inappropriate ads.
Have you ever noticed how the ads on an Internet page often seem directly related to the content on the page? If a person reads a page about depression, it’s a pretty safe bet that the ads on the page could be about depression medications or therapists. This form of advertising is called contextual advertising and attempts to display advertising content similar to page content in the hope that readers interested in a specific topic will be more open to browsing related advertising.
Contextual ad has been around for a few years already, and companies like Google are credited with starting this trend. When web page authors or content authors use specific words or keywords and titles and sign up for programs like Google AdSense, they can set up a group of contextual ads for each page and the more specific their writing, the more likely they are to match the advertisements. With more matching of a contextual ad comes hope that readers will click on the ads, and this can create profits for the website owner and the company generating the ads.
There are many ways to display a contextual ad. They can be simple text on the side of a page, popups that occur when people hover over words, or they can occur in other forms. As advertising has become more sophisticated, such ads can include not only clickable links but also audio or video clips.
For the website owner, even one whose goal is to provide information or write about a beloved topic, signing up with one or more contextual ad programs can keep the website up and running while making profits. On the other hand, there are some cases where contextual ads need to be considered carefully or they just don’t make sense. For example, a business that sells products might not want contextual ads, except their own, on their site. Sending potential buyers to other sites wouldn’t make much sense.
Ad placement is also important. Sending a customer off-site when the goal is to keep them on the page to click more ads, perhaps, is something wrong. Instead, it’s easy enough to learn the HTML code that allows you to open a contextual ad in a pop-up window without taking people off the current page. This code makes sense for most website owners.
There are a few issues with contextual ad, and these have to do with what is considered in context or aligned with the content. Very sensitive individuals may post ads in direct opposition to the covered material. An article about anorexia could generate ads about diet pills, for example. Sometimes people need to make sure that an article or page does not contain advertisements, to avoid these kinds of unpleasant and contradictory messages.
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