Let’s face the reality that cookie era is gone. Consumers are calling for more control over their personal information on the internet, and Google is putting a stop to all behavioral targeting strategies. So, now what will happen to those marketers who relied on the third-party data?

Contextual Advertising is quickly gaining attention as the prime solution to target customers in this cookie-less era, as the behavioral targeting is phasing out.

Let’s understand about contextual advertising and what it holds for the marketers who rely on the third-party cookie to target the customers.

What is Contextual Advertising?

Contextual advertising is a form of targeted advertising that serves ads based on the context of the webpage being viewed by the user. Instead of relying on personal data or the browsing history of individual users, contextual advertising considers the content of the webpage, including images, video, and topics, to determine which ads to display.

For example, if a customer is going through an article or webpage related to cooking recipes, there could be an ad related to ready to cook food items. These ads are placed according to where they are currently not according to where they were or what they were searching earlier.

Importance of Contextual Advertising

In an era of heightened privacy concerns and regulatory scrutiny, contextual advertising offers a privacy-friendly alternative to behavioral targeting. Since it does not rely on tracking individual user behavior or collecting personal data, contextual advertising helps advertisers comply with privacy regulations while still reaching their target audience effectively.

Benefits of Contextual Advertising

Here are some of the benefits of Contextual Advertising making it a suitable option over behavioral targeting in the cookie-less era.

Reach the Right People at the Right Time: Contextual Advertising helps the advertisers to reach users based on the content that they are interacting with in the real time, rather than using their previous browsing data. This tactic allows the brands to reach the customers when they are in the receptive frame of mind, as the content a user is viewing at any given time signals their interest and intent towards that topic or product.

Protect Consumer Privacy: Now customers are concerned about their data privacy. Contextual Advertising does not depend on the third-party cookie data like behavioral advertising. It depends on the content or context of the webpage and places relevant ads according to that. By doing so, Contextual Advertising protects the consumer’s data and provides them with the relevant ads.

Target Niche Audiences: With the help of Contextual Advertising, advertisers can target the users by topic or a collection of contexts, which can be as broad or granular as desired. This means the brands can reach those niche customers that they want to reach or target.

Build Brand Affinity: Nowadays customers are concerned about the brands reputation while shopping online and the environments where the brands choose to display their ads. Contextual Advertising helps the brands with providing a safe advertising environment while also keeping the brand affinity as they display ads according to the content or context in the webpage.

Contextual Advertising in 3 simple steps:

To understand contextual advertising further, these 3 simple steps will be helpful.

AI (Artificial Intelligence) Powered Analysis: A contextual intelligence platform with the help of Artificial Intelligence technology such as Natural Language Processor (NLP) scans and identifies the content in the webpage.

Actionable Insights: Then these data are translated to an actionable insight to target the customers.

Contextually Placed Ads: The Contextual Intelligence Platform then places relevant ads within the webpage aligning with the user’s behavior and the content they are consuming through In-Screen, In-Image or In-Article environment.