In our last post we announced the integration of the first data provider on our RTB Platform — Proximic. They power our contextual targeting capabilities, which allows you to run your campaigns exclusively on pages that match your chosen contextual categories.
At the moment, when you target sites, they are essentially “run of site” aside from the global targeting rules you set for the campaign (geo, device, page position, dimension, etc.) With contextual targeting, you can now target the specific pages (based on categories) within sites. However, this depends on having a certain amount of content on pages with which to classify them.
Best Sites for Contextual Targeting
Some sites lend themselves to contextual targeting more than others. Sites with a variety of content are ideal. Some examples would be news sites (foxnews.com, latimes.com, etc.), which have a variety of subjects and topics of discussion. The same applies to large article directories (about.com, answers.com, etc.) and forums.
Some sites that you may want to avoid when using contextual targeting are image-heavy or media sharing sites. Others include sites with very little text content, or very erratic content like social networking sites.
Alternatively, if you don’t feel like hand-picking the sites for your contextually-targeted campaign, you can simply choose to do Run Of Network (RON).
Inferred Demographic Targeting
Another benefit to contextual targeting is that you can now basically do inferred demographic targeting based on category.
An obvious example would be “Lifestyle::Senior Living”, where we could reasonably assume that we would be targeting more senior demographics. Your imagination is the limit when it comes to matching up categories with demographics.
- Style & Fashion::Jewelry
- Sports::Bodybuilding
- Sports::Rodeo
- Sports::NASCAR Racing
- Sports::Figure Skating
- Home & Garden::Interior Decorating
- Hobbies & Interests::Needlework
With a little brainstorming you can take some reasonable guesses at the genders, age ranges, income levels, and possibly marital statuses of the categories listed above. This should give some insight into one approach towards implementing contextual targeting for your campaigns.
Expect to see proper demographic (and most likely behavioral) targeting data on the system in the near future.
Coming Soon: Brand Protection!
According to a recent Econsultancy survey, nearly 70% of advertisers say their top concern with ad networks is having their ads show up next to inappropriate content.
If you or your agency represent a brand, there is a good chance they have concerns with their reputation. Proper context is very important to brand reputation, and Brand Protection functionality will help make this possible.
Brand Protection will allow you to only target sites/pages that match your brand safety criteria. For example, you will be able to block specific types of “non-standard content” such as:
- Adult
- Weapons
- Drugs
- Terrorism
- User-generated Content
- File Sharing
- and more…
You will also be able to specify the rating level of the pages your campaign wishes to target: “G”, “PG”, and “R”.
With 3rd party data partners, like Proximic, we now have the power to give you more control over where your ads show up on sites.
Stay tuned for the final part of our contextual targeting series where we’ll share the results of some case studies.
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