Google Advertising Tools, 2nd Edition

Contextual Relevance

The holy grail of advertising is to have a prospect interested in your product, and have an ad targeted to that prospect just at the moment he is researching the product. Put another way, suppose you decide you need a new toothbrush. On the way to the drugstore, you hear a radio ad or see a billboard specifically extolling one brand of toothbrush. This is potentially powerful stuff, and something that the relevance engines behind CPC programs make easy. After all, when you hit a page of information about toothbrushes after searching for them online, Google knows you are interested in toothbrushes and can easily serve appropriate ads.

The basis of CPC advertising is having visitors to your website click the links presented to them by ads. People are likely to notice ads, and click on ad links, only if the content of the ad is relevant to their current interests. This leads to the notion of contextually relevant advertising (usually referred to simply as contextual advertising) often being confused with CPC advertising, even though the two are not the same.

Contextual advertising, which as I’ve noted need not be CPC, but often is, hopes to target a specific individual visiting a website (or page within a website). More accurately, it is the web page itself that is being targeted. A contextual advertising system scans the text of a website for keywords and returns advertisements to the web page based on the website (see Figure 6-2). To some degree, it is possible ...