Contextual advertising. All the subtleties of contextual advertising

contextual advertising- a special type of advertising on the Internet, which appears in accordance with the search query, or depends on the meaning of the page. For example, you score in Yandex or any other search engine query "how to choose a TV". Above, below or to the right of the main links appear text ads dedicated to your search query. In these places there is contextual advertising of sites about TVs or their purchase.

Context Feature

The main feature is the unobtrusive demonstration of advertising. That is why such ads are not annoying.

How contextual advertising works

A special program automatically selects ads according to a special algorithm. They usually correspond to the theme of the page and which the site visitor entered.

The main leaders of contextual advertising

Contextual advertising is managed through specialized interfaces to create specific ads or keywords. This is how a clear management of various advertising campaigns is realized. In Russia, the most famous contextual advertising regulation systems include:

Contextual advertising from yandex, google, begun

Yandex.Direct- a system with the help of which advertisements are placed in the Yandex search and on partner sites, where the subject of the site pages is determined automatically.
Google AdWords- a system by which advertisements are placed in Google search, and on partner sites. The subject of advertising is determined automatically.
Runner- a system with which advertisements are placed in the search Rambler, and shows ads in the global network of personal sites.
MediaTarget- a system for displaying advertisements on LiveInternet projects.

Contextual advertising principles

The customer's advertisement is shown only to those users who are interested in it.
Advertising is placed on well-known search engines or thematic sites.
The customer pays for transitions to the site by clicking on an advertisement.
The customer himself determines the price for the transition to his site.
The distribution of places is implemented according to the auction principle (the leading place in the search engine is occupied by the one who paid the maximum price).

It's easy to calculate. CRT (click through rate - the product of the number of clicks and the number of impressions) is multiplied by the cost per click. We get a number. If you have more than others, then your ad will be shown. If it's less, then it probably won't. To get into the impression, you need to increase the CRT or increase the cost per click.

Hello, dear readers of the blog site. If you are a business owner and you have a website (an online store, a service website, etc.), then you will most likely have to attract visitors to it, either with the help of SEO or contextual advertising. And most often, using both of these channels.

We will talk about SEO a lot and in detail within this section (in relation to a commercial site), but general issues we will consider work with a context right now.

Well, in future articles, perhaps, we will touch on the details of creating and setting up campaigns in Yandex Direct and Google Adwords.

Contextual advertising opportunities and secrets of success

Contextual advertising in Google AdWords

Let's start with the possible placements for your ads when using this contextual advertising system:

There are several ad formats available on Google Adwords:

Yandex Direct

First of all, Direct is chosen for its huge reach of the target audience (this will be true for most commercial sites). If you need to get real large influx of targeted visitors, then often there is simply no alternative to this contextual advertising system (in Adwords, there may simply not be such a number of users interested in buying something).

Possibilities fine tuning Direct's campaigns are somewhat poorer than those of its competitor from Google, and the cost of attracting a client is somewhat higher, but you have to put up with this. Let's see where your ads placed through Yandex contextual advertising can appear:

Runner

To be honest, I didn't even keep track. Lately, where their ads are shown (probably still in Rambler mixed with Direct and in the affiliate network). A contextual advertising market share of 1.5 percent does not motivate such research. You can try it yourself and draw your own conclusions.

Any business, even the most profitable and interesting at the beginning, in the end, can begin, as they say, to slip. Customers are paying less and less attention to the product, activity is falling, and the entrepreneur is faced with the problem posed in the title of this article - how to remind potential buyers of yourself? The correct answer is advertising. However, modern printed and outdoor advertising shows its extreme inefficiency - there is so much of it around a potential client that he subconsciously develops a dislike for the product. The perfect way re-assert yourself and attract customers - order contextual advertising. What is it and how to use it? More on this later.

Contextual advertising - what is it?

To date, this type of advertising from time to time show their high efficiency and relevance. It is a text link or banner that announces you and your company to the audience that is most interested in it. Modern contextual advertising, the prices for which will pleasantly surprise anyone, is highly targeted - in other words, it hits exactly your target. target audience leaving only a small percentage of potential buyers and customers uncovered.

An example of contextual advertising ads in Google, Yandex

Principles of contextual advertising

In fact, the principle is very simple and lies literally “on the surface”. According to the logic of placing contextual advertising, with a search query, the user wants to see not only useful information, but also promotional links - useful for those who want to make a purchase or place an order. In other words, if the user is looking for information on the tag “ plastic windows”, he is most likely interested in the purchase of such windows, their installation or maintenance. Using the opportunity to order contextual advertising, you will make sure that the ad about you will be seen by exactly those users who are interested in similar information. Thanks to this feature, contextual advertising, the prices for which are not so high, is many times more targeted than traditional advertising.

Today, there are many services that can correctly place contextual advertising and ensure that as many potential customers as possible get acquainted with your company. For example, a web service that is distinguished by the absence of additional commissions, automatic settings and the presence of a robot that manages advertising, which, you see, is indispensable for beginners. In the same time ordinary species advertisements, such as banner or transit advertisements, may cover best case 15% of your target audience, which does not match their value at all.

Earnings on contextual advertising

Contextual advertising today is beneficial, not only for those who want to remind themselves with its help, but also for third-party sites whose creators place ads on their own. Part of the money from indexed clicks goes to the site creator, and part goes to the provider, so with contextual advertising, spending a very small amount of money, you can earn many times more - if there was a desire, but such an opportunity is provided.

Why contextual advertising?

Summing up, let's say once again why ordering contextual advertising is profitable and convenient for everyone:

Focus only on the target audience. Such advertising is seen only by your potential customers and those who may well become them, as a result - increasing attention to your company and the product / service it produces.
Low price. You can order contextual advertising at a price much lower than print counterparts. At the same time, the return on its activity will be many times greater. You will feel the effect in a short period of time.
Practicality and convenience. In order to order such advertising, you can always find a professional who has long had a hand in it. As a rule, contextual advertising does not require a lot of designer work, which means that its creation will be many times faster and cheaper. A specialist will help you target advertising to the needs of your target audience.

As follows from the above, contextual advertising is beneficial to everyone. However, like any other advertising, it will only work if it appears in right hands, run by a real specialist. It is in the search for such a specialist that the main task of the advertiser lies, and contextual advertising will not be slow to remind those whom you want to reach out to.

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Since in this material we will cover the basics of contextual advertising - for your convenience, we divided it into main points.

What is contextual advertising?

Contextual advertising is a type of advertising on the Internet, which is a text or image ad and is shown depending on the request (context) of the user. The advertiser himself chooses for which requests and on which sites the advertisement of his site will be shown. There are two main types of contextual advertising: thematic and search.

This post from the editors of IM will help you understand the basic concepts of contextual advertising, make it clear what contextual advertising is, how it looks and works, as well as what systems and services are most often used to run advertising on the Internet.

search engine

Search contextual advertising will be shown to the user if his request matches those specified by the advertiser in the settings of his company. The main advantage of this type of advertising is that the user himself shows interest in a certain product and writes about it in the search box, we just have to say (using advertising) that we offer this type of product.

This ad works on all major search engines. Yandex, Google, Rambler, Mail, Bing, Yahoo, Badoo and others. At the same time, the algorithm for displaying advertisements for each individual system may differ, as, for example, in the case of Yandex and Google. And such a search engine as Badoo (the Chinese analogue of Google) is partly closed altogether, since it is possible to place ads there only while in China.

Thematic

Thematic contextual advertising will be shown to users on sites that participate in affiliate programs ( Google AdScense, Yandex Advertising Network). The display of which ads will be carried out depends on the last requests the user entered or the sites of which subjects he visited (which is also a context).

Most likely, you yourself have noticed more than once that after searching, let's say “buying shoes”, on the pages of other sites and in in social networks advertisements begin to appear offering the purchase of shoes. By the way, this is the main advantage of thematic contextual advertising, even if the ad has not been viewed or clicked on in the search results, it still remains chance to attract a user to your site and talk about the product.

But there are topics for which it is forbidden to display ads based on user behavior ( medicine, goods for adults), so they can use another type of thematic contextual advertising - contextual targeting or display by sites. For example, in a forum about medicine, in the discussion thread about implantation of dentures, ads for dentistry may be shown.

Can it then happen that your ad will be shown on a low-quality site or on a site that violates the laws of the Russian Federation? No, because only verified sites with high traffic can take part in affiliate programs, so you don’t have to worry about the company being compromised due to advertising on a “not good” site.

Retargeting and remarketing

We moved retargeting and remarketing into a separate section because they can be used without connecting the first two types of context.

Contextual advertising systems

Yandex.Direct

IN last years, Google has selected a significant part of the Yandex audience, thanks to mobile traffic, but nevertheless, more than 2,000,000 people use Yandex search every day! This is the largest Russian search engine. Therefore, advertising in Yandex Direct enjoys great popularity. In addition, Direct is easier to set up.

on Yandex search results pages;
on the sites of the Yandex affiliate network ().

The choice of which ad will be shown for a specific request and for a specific user is automatically determined by Yandex algorithms based on relevance to the topic, rate per click, CTR, city, and other indicators.

Google AdWords

More advanced interface, to which Yandex Direct has recently been moving, offers. In addition to the variety of tools for setting up and analyzing the effectiveness of advertising, which also involves more painstaking settings, Google allows you to advertise your site not only in Russia, but throughout the world (except China and North Korea).

By analogy with Yandex, advertising is divided into search and thematic (KMS), and in addition to the pages of the search engine and partner sites (including Bing and Mail) it assumes display on the pages Google services(Maps, Gmail, Merchant, YouTube, Pictures and the like).

Wherein for YouTube and Gmail, you can set up ads separately, in the form of a letter or your video, which greatly expands the advertiser's ability to reach their target audience.

Also, you can separately set up advertising campaigns for mobile devices (tablets and smartphones), which, depending on the target audience, allows you to make targeting more accurate. And in advertisements, in addition to standard clarifications and quick links, you can configure the display of goods and services with their cost.

Geographic targeting can be set not only for a region, country or city, but for a separate area by setting a point in the right place on the map and specifying the coverage radius.

Contextual advertising in 2017-2018

If a couple of years ago, you could simply collect a database of relevant keywords, write ad texts and track bids, now, with the rapidly growing cost per click and competition, you need to be able to work with all possible formats and targeting. Find exactly those visitors who will bring profit, and not just go to the site. Find your way by testing different approaches and formats. Because there is no longer a single correct approach to setting up ads.

In addition, if earlier there was a significant difference between Yandex Direct and Google AdWords, today it is becoming less obvious, and in the future it will cease to exist at all. This is because Yandex is introducing more and more new tools in order to catch up with its foreign competitor in terms of a set of tools.

It is worth noting that contextual advertising in 2017 becomes more personalized, expanding the ability to target different audiences. Growing importance correct setting for those users who search from mobile devices. There are more ad formats. The possibilities of analytics are increasing.

All this serves as the basis that the contextual advertising market in 2018 will only continue to grow. More and more new advertisers will come, who will be more aware of advertising on the Internet and will be more demanding of contractors. Nevertheless, this direction is one of the most promising on the market for at least another 5-10 years.

What is contextual advertising?

Context in Latin means connection or connection.

The display of contextual advertising is always relevant to a person's request or area of interest that intersects with the subject of the advertised service or product. This method of selecting ads greatly increases the likelihood of a response to an ad.

Why do you need contextual advertising?

Context is very common in situations such as:

Promotion of goods;
Advertisement of services;
Increasing sales;
Bringing new products to market;
As an effective addition to the main channels of advertising outside the Internet.

Contextual advertising on the Internet is an ideal and unobtrusive variant of cooperation between the buyer and the seller. It is worth “telling” the search engine about the desire to buy something or order a certain service, as you can immediately get an answer with the phrase: “order from us”.

Accordingly, the main task in compiling a selling advertising campaign is the selection of keywords and anchors that will attract interested buyers to the site, saving money for an advertiser who is only interested in the target audience.

Services such as Google Analytics, Yandex.Metrika and Yandex.Wordstat will help to study and understand the audience, as well as select key phrases for contextual advertising.

Contextual advertising of any format is widely and massively used to increase brand popularity. It can easily make a very recognizable brand out of a novelty.

In this case, it makes sense to order contextual advertising and pay not for each click received, but for the number of impressions. For such advertising campaigns, such a contextual advertising service as Begun is perfect.

Advantages and disadvantages of contextual advertising

Such contextual advertising giants as Google AdWords, Yandex.Direct and Begun have already gained immense popularity and are ready to provide their audience with wide range ads of different topics and work with automatic detection of interests, as well as page topics.

When displaying contextual advertising, the interests of users are taken into account in terms of entering a request, browsing pages, personal interests and history of search activity;
Ability to use geo-targeting and select when ads are shown to users. Thus, the contextual advertising ordered by you can be shown in a strictly certain time days;
Large coverage of the audience and Internet resources of various directions.

The most tangible disadvantage of contextual advertisements is their constant click-through. Such actions are performed not only by advertiser competitors, but also by unscrupulous webmasters whose goal is to earn extra money. Such actions lead to a decrease in the effectiveness of advertising and to additional costs;
The cost of a click in a really highly competitive topic can reach $10 or even more. Some advertisers are not willing to spend that kind of money in pursuit of getting the best ad position. As a result, everyone loses;
Recently, when sites are spammed with ads, it has begun to terribly annoy users. Moreover, it greatly hinders the search for the necessary information;
Many users install various programs and plug-ins for blocking contextual ads, so not all users will be able to see your ads.
Links from contextual advertising systems are encrypted or work using a redirect, which does not bring any benefit to the site in terms of promotion. It is quite obvious that such links do not affect the position of the advertised site in the search results.

The most popular contextual advertising services (Yandex.Direct, Google AdWords, Begun) - basic information for beginners

The above pros and cons apply to all three of these contextual advertising systems, although each has its own principle of operation.

Google AdWords contextual advertising has a very good system selection of ads that takes into account the interests of users, their preferences and activity when typing certain requests.

If there are no relevant queries for issuance in the search, the advertising context is selected taking into account personal interests. This is perhaps the main advantage of contextual advertising in Google.

Yandex.Direct has a narrower direction of issue, focused exclusively on search phrases, and if there is simply no advertising for a certain query, it is not displayed in the search.

On the selection of ads, like Google, Yandex has just begun to experiment, but it will take a very long time to go to the full implementation of such a system.

Setting up contextual advertising - basic information for beginners

There are a lot of secrets for setting up advertising campaigns, and on the net you can read not only something really important, but also heaps of thoughts that for several years have not even had minimal effectiveness, confirming their significance.

We will focus only on the main points of setting up contextual advertising, which can really help reduce costs and increase the effectiveness of an ongoing advertising campaign:

The right approach to the selection of keywords that will be used in compiling contextual advertisements;
Geographic indicators are very important so that ads are not clicked by citizens of another country or a distant region;
Setting the time of impressions;
Setting the budget for an individual ad and daily spending;
Disabling unscrupulous sources from which ads are clicked;
demographic features.

Yandex.Direct - advantages, disadvantages, features

Yandex.Direct existed back in 2001 as a service for low-budget companies and was designed only for impressions. After 2 years, the system was completely improved and pay-per-clicks were introduced:

Advantages :

Availability of geotargeting;
No additional targeting fees;
A huge proportion of advertising is designed strictly for search traffic, and not for advertising on the site.

Flaws :

Cumbersome statistics interface;
It is not possible to show ads for queries that include more than 5 words;
There is no effective automatic bid management;
Too limited in the size of the title bar and text of the contextual advertisement;
It is not possible to export advertising campaign statistics to Excel.

Runner - advantages, disadvantages, features

Advantages :

original design;
Convenient usability;
Huge audience coverage;
Opportunity automatic control rates;
9 ways to pay for advertising services;
Detailed information on any ongoing advertising campaign;
Convenient preparation and uploading of reports;
Plenty of space for ads;
Availability of an affiliate program.

Flaws :

Unreliable statistics;
Long statistics update;
Long moderation;
Lack of regional targeting;
Poor audience quality.

Google AdWords - - advantages, disadvantages, features

No matter what happens and no matter what they say, Google has a full-fledged leader in contextual advertising in terms of extensive opportunities for conducting advertising campaigns:

Advantages :

Advertising with graphic and text blocks;
Low activation cost;
Efficient transfer cost management;
Setting a daily budget;
Round the clock statistics;
Quick placement of ads;
Quick and easy ad change;
Fully self-selection keys;
Geographic targeting;
Accurate display scheduling;
Selection of the most effective advertising places.

Flaws :

No advertising discounts;
Intentional price increases by competitors;
The complexity of managing advertising campaigns;
Does not accept all bank cards;
The high cost of clicks in highly competitive queries.

Google AdWords, Yandex.Direct, and Begun are three clear leaders in contextual advertising. Which one to trust is up to you, they all have pros and cons.

The best option would be to run an example of contextual advertising for 2-4 weeks in each service. Thus, you will not lose a lot of money and make for yourself a summary of the profitability and payback of placing an advertising campaign.