What is Contextual Advertising?

The internet has gone through various models of advertising in its commercial existence. For a long time the prevalent method was – no method. As ridiculous as this seems, advertisers placed their ads wherever they found cheap or high traffic locations. Ads were displayed in predefined rotations, which to the user seemed to be random displays. In the recent past, this has thankfully changed and has been received with mixed reactions by internet users.

Defining Contextual advertising as “advertising based on keywords” is a bare bones definition but this is what it is at its core. The concept is very smart and the targeting it can achieve, is very accurate. This has proved to be a godsend for most vendors.

Let us look at a very specific example. A user visits a sports news website and clicks on Basketball News. The resulting page can have advertisements for New/Used basketballs, favorite team/player kits, etc. The user proceeds to browse through player names and clicks Michael Jordan. The resulting page might display ads for Jordan memorabilia, Chicago Bulls merchandise, championship game DVDs etc. What this means is that the page will display ads that are relevant to the content on that page. This is possible because the vendors are able to choose keywords that are connected with the advertisement.

The first major player in providing this type of technology was Google with AdSense. Google employed JavaScript to achieve the desired results, but with new players entering the market the technology has diversified. This method has proved to be very successful in online sales as it allows vendors to reach a specific target market based on their browsing and searches. But on the other hand, it has also annoyed a fair amount of users due to excess profiling and targeting.