Have you been able to find success in the world of pay per click marketing but quickly getting sick and tired of playing all the games with Google and their quality score issues and high ad costs? If you’ve discovered how to create winning ad copy and understand the basics of keyword marketing, you might also find success in the world of contextual advertising.
While contextual advertising doesn’t rely on search engines for their traffic, you are still bidding on keywords and getting right in the face of highly targeted users. As an advertiser through contextual advertising, you are also paying on a per click basis.
Jason Chan, the Marketing Assistant at Clicksor, one of the largest online advertisers for contextual advertising solutions, has taken the time to go into the differences and comparisons between both pay per click marketing and contextual advertising.
PPC advertising will display text banner advertisements on search engines. It will display the advertisement with the occurrence of the ‘searched term’ despite the meaning the user is searching for. For example, if you are searching for the word “online advertisement” the search engine may only display results that are related to both online and advertisement not necessary information pertaining to online advertisement.
Contextual advertising achieves a similar type of matching, but in a larger scope. By contrast, contextual advertising is not limited to search engine queries only. It can be applied to general websites of any type. Further, contextual advertising can support keyword phrases and categories on top of individual keywords. Finally, where PPC advertising is specific to a per click cost metric, contextual advertising is applicable to multiple cost metrics such as cost per 1,000 impression (CPM) and cost per view (CPV).
When comparing the differences between ppc marketing and contextual advertising, while they are both similar, they can also both be worlds apart.
The important thing to realize is that the same way you learn to create and scale pay per click marketing campaigns, can be used the same way when scaling contextual advertising. There is a specific amount on how many people search for specific keywords within in a niche, so you may run into a wall at which you can scale.
Through contextual advertising you can reach the same audience through the web sites and blogs they visit, while also most likely paying at a lower cost per click. This is mainly due to the high saturation and costs brought on from the major advertising and search results.
