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In the complex digital landscape, knowing how to reach your audience is crucial for success. Driving brand messaging with precision and accuracy can be tricky as marketers prepare for the end of third party cookies, but there’s good news. Contextual targeting has come a long way since its beginning, now offering more precision and accuracy than ever before. This allows marketers to optimize campaigns for the right context and in brand safe and suitable environments.
What is Contextual Targeting?
Contextual targeting gives marketers the power to reach their unique brand goals before a programmatic bid is placed. Contextual targeting uses curated segments that are available programmatically for marketers to choose from based on their brand’s needs.
Contextual targeting technology uses predictive science that pre-screens pages and categorizes them using emotion and sentiment analysis. This sophisticated targeting method lets marketers understand the true context, sentiment, and semantics of a given webpage to optimize strategies and reach desired audiences without the use of third party cookies. By scanning page content to display ads within suitable environments, brands can increase recognition, personalization, engagement, and favorability towards their messaging.
How do marketers use contextual targeting?
As third party cookie usage declines, the importance of contextual targeting is skyrocketing. Contextual targeting can even help brands build trust among consumers. According to IAS research, 68% of consumers are uncomfortable with their online data being used for advertising purposes — and, as we know, contextual targeting doesn’t require the use of any personal data.
Marketers turn to contextual targeting to target audiences based on specific interests, relevant events, and more. Marketers can choose from contextual segments that are offered within demand-side platforms (DSPs) and allow them to target based on industry vertical, season, topic, and more. For example, a travel brand may want to use a “Spring Break” contextual segment as that time of year approaches to show up in contexts that match that specific segment.
Additionally, contextual targeting helps marketers avoid unsuitable environments for their ads. Using AI and machine learning, contextual targeting uses deeper classification of content to focus on driving relevant, authentic ads. Contextual targeting remains one of the most efficient and effective solutions to market your brand, enabling marketers to improve return on ad spend.
The Benefits of Contextual Targeting
With their unmatched precision and ability to optimize campaigns, contextual targeting products are essential for marketers to stay ahead of the competition and drive ROI in a post-cookie world. Here are some key strengths of utilizing contextual targeting:
- Relevant Personalization: Contextual targeting technology helps deliver highly relevant ads to specific audiences based on the client’s activated segment. By connecting with a user on a personalized and tailored level, the user is more likely to engage with the content — and we have proof. IAS found that 60% of consumers are likely to purchase a product after being served a targeted advertisement. It’s simple: positive experiences for users leads to positive conversions for brands.
- Increased Brand Safety: Contextual targeting excels in avoiding inappropriate and unsafe spaces to keep a brand’s ads effective and relevant. This kind of targeting also gives brands unparalleled tailoring over their ad placements, which enhances brand messaging and sentiment.
- Cost-Effective: Contextual targeting is efficient in saving ad spend as a scalable alternative that omits third party cookies altogether. Like its name, contextual targeting only utilizes the context of a page to target accurately and at scale. In a cookieless world, this kind of targeting maximizes impact while significantly saving financial resources.
How IAS can help
At IAS, brands can take further control of tailoring ad content that meets unique brand goals with our Context Control Targeting products. Our predictive science allows marketers to understand the true context, sentiment, and semantics of a given webpage at scale. Plus, IAS gives programmatic buyers ad tailoring abilities and optimized media quality control — all without the use of third party cookies.
With IAS’s contextual targeting products, marketers can leverage key benefits including:
- Page-level classification to curate content for actionable campaigns
- 350+ industry vertical, topical, seasonal and audience proxy contextual segments for targeting within major DSPs
- The industry’s largest knowledge graph to enable deeper classification of content at scale, plus easy activation in all major DSPs
- Proprietary cognitive semantic technology which leverages Natural Language Processing (NLP)
- Cookie-free and privacy-safe targeting using emotion and sentiment-based efficiencies
- Scaled content adjacency to drive optimized results
- Personalized recommendations for selecting the best targeting segments for your campaigns
Learn more about how IAS’s suite of contextual targeting products can help you drive superior results for your brand. Contact an IAS representative today to get started.
