Today contextual advertising is becoming a fairly popular way to promote a website. It's no wonder: ordering contextual advertising is simple, straightforward, and the principle is easy to understand.
You create an ad, submit it to a contextual advertising system – choose Yandex, Begun, or Google AdWords – and wait for a stream of unique visitors interested in your products (services, information) to come to your site. Clearly, increased traffic will boost the site's profitability. Isn't that the main goal of a website owner? In this article we answer: «What is contextual advertising and why is it needed?», «How to create an effective ad using specific keywords?», «What are the differences between various contextual advertising systems?» Let’s find out.
The essence of contextual advertising is placing ads on third-party websites. Ads are shown in context, meaning they fully or partially match the theme of the web page. The advertiser pays for clicks on the ad, and the website hosting the ads receives a fee for unique user clicks. Of course, the contextual advertising system keeps a percentage for mediation, since advertisers and webmasters find each other through it.
Contextual advertising is actively displacing banner exchange networks and becoming one of the most effective tools for comprehensive site promotion. Compared to flashy colored banners that often annoy users with their intrusiveness (and don’t always match the site’s theme), contextual ads look much calmer because they are text-based. Contextual ad blocks match the overall design of the website or search engine. Thus – contextual advertising irritates site visitors less than banners, pop-ups, or other multimedia gimmicks.
Advantages of Contextual Advertising
One advantage of contextual advertising is that ads can be placed on a search engine results page. Clearly, a person searching for «site promotion and marketing» in Yandex is more likely to click your ad shown in the results than follow a link from an external, even thematic, website. That is why all major contextual advertising systems operate directly from search services. Yandex owns Yandex.Direct, Google – Google AdWords, and Begun is a Rambler project.
We could write an ode to the benefits of contextual advertising, but instead we’ll list the main advantages briefly:
— attracting a targeted audience to your site
— guaranteed high traffic (ads placed in search engines and on numerous partner sites)
— quick results (ads start working as soon as they appear online)
— cost-effectiveness – you pay only for clicks by unique users (no artificial inflation possible)
— easy budgeting – contextual advertising is affordable even on a minimal budget
— control over ad placement — you can choose which sites and pages will show your ads
— simple campaign management
— ability to quickly adjust in response to market changes or promotion tactics
— the ability to show ads to audiences in a specific region (geotargeting)
— time targeting – your ads can be shown during specified time intervals, for example only at certain hours.
Disadvantages of Contextual Advertising
Despite many obvious advantages, contextual advertising has a few downsides:
1. Cost per click – the auction system forces advertisers to constantly raise bids to keep good ad positions.
2. Narrow query topics can place competitor sites next to each other in the same ad block, and a publishing site may become direct competition to your product or service.
3. Distrust of contextual ads – recently there have been more cases of scams being advertised. Systems do monitor fraudulent ads, but when there are no clear violations, dubious ads can remain next to legitimate offers, thereby tarnishing the image of honest advertisers.
You can find other minor drawbacks, but they don’t play a decisive role in choosing this promotion method.
Contextual advertising is the most acceptable and effective method for comprehensive site promotion, especially if the site owner is focused on selling products and/or services. The systems reviewed here are best used either together or one after another — only by testing can you determine what works best for your site and delivers great results while saving your ad budget.
Order from us the setup and launch of contextual advertising on Yandex and Google and get new clients!
