Contextual advertising: pros and cons

The approach to understanding and setting up contextual advertising changes annually. Therefore, its advantages and disadvantages are inconstant characteristics. At the same time, there are several features that are inherent only to CR.

From this article you will learn the main advantages and disadvantages  pros and cons of contextual advertising.

Advantages of contextual advertising

The following advantages of contextual advertising can be highlighted:

• Work immediately after launch. Contextual germany whatsapp data campaigns start working from the day of their launch. Users interested in a deal immediately see advertising offers in search results and on various sites, click on ads and move from a warm audience to buyers.
• Prompt result. Some experts compare contextual advertising with SEO, but this is incorrect, because such activities differ in the mechanism of action, and sometimes are based on different principles of work.

The speed of the result is one of the most important differences between CR and SEO:

with search engine optimization, you have to wait for the effect, and contextual pros and cons advertising starts bringing in customers instantly. That is, after its launch, interested people call, go to the site and buy goods. SEO works slower because it takes a lot of time, because in order to please search algorithms, you need to create relevant content, remove technical errors on the site, improve the user interface, create an authoritative link profile and develop good building an email list: how to get behavioral factors. Of course, CR ads have their own requirements, and it also takes time to develop, configure and correctly launch advertising. However, it is still faster than creating a site from scratch and making it attractive to search robots.

• Transparency and clarity of payment. The advantage of KR is that you see what you are paying for (for clicks, impressions or traffic). All investments can be tracked. You are aware of the rate, price per click, you choose the desired traffic yourself, and also allocate money for launching advertising.
• You can see the efficiency. The Yandex Direct and Google AdWords advertising systems have statistics for all campaigns.

For example, if the goal for a campaign was set as “Call”, i.e. the person who clicked on the ad should call you, then “Metrica” ​​will tell you how many users called the phone number indicated on the site. You can evaluate the results of the campaign not only by financial, but also by behavioral factors. Thus, the click-through rate (CTR) allows you to understand which ads are attractive to visitors and from which advertising platforms they usually go to the site.

• Large-scale coverage. Contextual advertising is aimed at people interested in a certain product. It may seem that this should reduce the coverage, but since CR is placed on various sites, it is possible to attract many users and not only from search results.
• Selection of the target audience (TA). As an advertiser, you decide where and to whom to show the CR. Using special filters, it can be configured to hit the TA with almost 100% accuracy.

For example, if you provide services in a certain city, you can specify the geolocation of users in the settings. KR allows you to select other parameters of the target audience, such as gender, language of the query, and type of device.

Disadvantages of contextual advertising

Unfortunately, in the case of KR there were some downsides. Here are some:

• This is very expensive. In search results, the burkina faso business directory first pros and cons four positions are CR, and then organic results follow.

Leading positions allow you to attract more visitors and earn a lot of clicks. However, good performance comes at a cost: you have to pay for every click, and in certain highly competitive topics, this is quite expensive.

• Difficulty in setup and need for constant maintenance.

To set up and run a contextual advertising campaign, it is enough to involve only a contextual advertising specialist. The participation of developers, SEO specialists, copywriters is not require. However, this does not mean that debugging a contextual advertising campaign is easy. Creating an advertising campaign is a complex, multi-stage process that includes:

1. development of a strategy describing the distribution of requests across campaigns, the number of impressions and other indicators;
2. collecting SEO core, grouping queries and selecting negative words to cut off non-target traffic;
3. creation of selling text content, adding UTM tags, clarification, etc.;
4. placing advertising campaigns in the account, debugging them and adding bid adjustments;
5. managing advertising campaigns, including evaluating statistics, adding negative phrases, and rejecting non-working sites.

• Strong competition in some topics.

In certain topics, there are many more competitors than in others. For example, we are talking about legal services or flower sales. The situation is complicat by the fact that the price per click is determin by the results of an auction, and the leading position is occupied by the ad for which the advertiser can pay the maximum bid. Therefore, if there are enough competitors, then you need to not only create high-quality and relevant ads, but also pay well for a click.

• Short term.

CR works quickly, but stops just as quickly. If the advertiser runs out of money or decides to suspend CR for other reasons, then clients will stop clicking on the ad at that very moment.

We have talked about the pros and cons of contextual advertising. What to choose: CR or SEO – it’s up to you. In any case, consider your tasks, budget and other factors, or better yet, consult a specialist.