Effective targeting is one of the most important aspects in display advertising. Contextual targeting allows advertisers to only place their ads on pages that meet their criteria. For example, advertisers can choose to have their ads served only on pages that match chosen categories such as “Real Estate::Buying/Selling Homes” or “Fashion::Accessories“, depending on the subject matter and target demographic of their campaign.
A week ago we soft launched our Contextual Targeting feature on our RTB platform. We are now officially announcing our integration with contextual data provider, Proximic, that powers our Contextual Targeting layer. It’s now possible for advertisers to leverage contextual targeting data on media buying campaigns to efficiently target pages that are only relevant to the categories and topics of their choice.
Targeting Categories
Top-Level Category List
Proximic has tens of thousands of very specific categories that can be targeted, however, to keep it manageable, we have decided to utilize the standard IAB category list, which consists of 23 top-level categories, and approximately 200 categories in total.
How It Works
Whenever an impression comes in to the system, the URL of the impression is passed to the Proximic classification system. When the Proximic technology evaluates the content of the URL, it returns with several categorizations, along with a number that indicates the relevancy score of each attributed category.
For example, a page containing a news article that discusses a national election might have the following categorizations attributed to it:
- Law, Gov’t, & Politics::Politics = 96 (high)
- Business::Government = 85 (high)
- Personal Finance::Retirement Planning = 55 (moderate)
- Real Estate::Buying/Selling Homes = 34 (low)
- Society::Senior Living = 21 (low)
From the interface, when you choose a category to target, you also choose the relevancy level that you wish the pages to have for that category.
- A relevancy of strong means that it will match scores above 70
- A relevancy of moderate means that it will match scores above 40
- A relevancy of low means that it will match scores above 15
With the use of Proximic data, we can now know the topics/categories that any URL falls in, before you bid on it. If a page does not meet your criteria, the system will not bid on it.
Data Cost
The cost of contextual targeting data is $0.000075 per impression (or $0.075 CPM). You only pay for the impressions that both match your criteria and which you win. It is factored into your bid price, should you choose to enable it in a campaign.
Since the overall amount of impressions being bid on is significantly less, the result is lower overall ad spend. However, since it’s more relevant traffic, which should improve campaign performance, the nominal cost of the 3rd party data is easily justified.
With the new contextual categorization technology, advertisers on our system can now add a powerful additional layer of targeting to campaigns. Keep your eyes open for a follow-up post where we will share some best practices for using contextual targeting.
Also stay tuned for more updates coming soon. We have our biggest traffic source integration being finalized this week!
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