Advertising
Contextual Advertising - The Popular Internet Marketing Option
By Prime Real
Apr 14, 2008 - 4:50:36 AM

There are different faces of Internet Marketing. Advertisers generally use the most relevant and beneficial advertising program to get maximum possible revenue or traffic onto their websites. Contextual advertising is a part of affiliate marketing programs, which is very much popular and widely used on websites these days.

Advertisers target their customers by providing advertisements matching with the context of current page being viewed by them. Contextual advertising is the term applied to advertisements appearing on websites or other media, such as content displayed in mobile phones, where the advertisements are selected and served by automated systems based on the content displayed by the user.

Contextual Advertising – Inception and Present

Google AdSense was the first major contextual advertising program. It was one of the most ambitious Internet Marketing projects of Google. This is an ad serving program offered by Google. Webmasters can register for Google AdSense program to enable text, image and, more recently, video advertisements on their sites. All the ads being displayed are monitored by Google and generate revenue on either a per-click or per-thousand-impressions basis. It took very less time for Google AdSense in being popular, it has become one of the most profits generating source for Google.

Other popular search engines like Yahoo, and MSN also got inspiration from Google AdSense program, and started their own Contextual Advertising program to harvest the endless revenue possibilities. The Yahoo! Publisher Network and Microsoft AdCenter are example of Contextual Advertising programs started by Yahoo and MSN respectively.

Contextual advertising has made a major impact on earnings of many websites. As the ads are more targeted they are more likely to get clicked, thus generating revenue for the owner of the website (and the server of the advertisement). A large part of Google's earnings are from their share of the contextual ads served on the millions of web pages running the AdSense program.

Working of Contextual Advertising Programs

A contextual ad system scans the text of a Web site for keywords and returns ads to the Web page based on what the user is viewing, either through ads placed on the page or pop-up ads. For example, if the user is viewing a site about movies, and the site uses contextual advertising, the user might see ads for latest movie releases, movie reviews, or current movie ticket sellers. Contextual advertising is also being used by search engines to display ads on their search results pages based on what keywords/phrases the users has searched for.

Contextual advertising has gained its composure. These advertising programs are not only being used by webmasters. People are using them on their blogs and personal websites to earn revenue and getting rewarded by this popular Internet Marketing option.