Why Choose Contextual Targeting for an Irish Brewery?

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Contextual Targeting is the technique of marketing a product or service on a website that is related to the product or service. For example: if you are selling home-owners insurance, it would be beneficial to advertise your service on real estate websites. In order to have homeowner’s insurance a consumer needs to first have a house, so after the purchase of a house the next natural step is to buy the insurance. The idea of contextual targeting is to get through to the consumer at the right place at the right time.

Contextual vs Behavioral:

Another marketing technique is called Behavioral Targeting and it is similar to Contextual Targeting, but while “Contextual targeting is the practice of displaying ads based on a website’s content” behavioral targeting involves “segmenting customers based on web browsing behavior, including things like pages visited, searches performed, links clicked, and products purchased” (Ho, 2018). Behavioral targeting uses data collected based on a consumer’s browser and purchase history to group consumers together and create marketing campaigns specifically for each of those groups. The data that is collected not only records what kind of websites a consumer visits but also how long they are on each site and what are they clicking while on that website. Using that data that is collected, marketers can figure out which websites would be best to advertise on in order to attract a specific group of consumers. “With behavioral targeting, shopper behavior and purchase intent can be combined to deliver highly relevant, highly personalized ads just at the moment when a shopper is most likely to make a purchase” (Ho, 2018).

Contextual targeting does not use all that data, but instead searches for websites with content and themes similar to the product, service, or brand and advertise on that related website. According to Ho, there are different kinds of contextual targeting, there is category contextual marketing, keyword contextual marketing, and semantic targeting. Category contextual marketing involves placing advertisements into websites within a pre-determined category. Keyword contextual marketing, where advertisements are placed on websites that have matching keywords. Semantic targeting involves using artificial intelligence to determine the theme of a webpage, “rather than just identifying matching keywords” and can place relevant advertisements.

While neither technique is better than the other, contextual marketing can be a bit less invasive to a consumer. With rules and regulations like the General Data Protection Regulation, or as it is otherwise known as: the GDPR, many advertisers are under pressure to be more transparent about the kind of data they collect, how they collect the data, and why they collect the data. More often than not, the data is collected for marketing purposes, but with contextual targeting, there is less of a need for some of the data that is collected making consumers feel a bit more comfortable when viewing advertisements when on the web.

Contextual Targeting Tool:

A great tool for assisting a marketer with contextual targeting is Google Ads. While setting up your keywords for your display network campaigns, Google’s system analyzes the content of the website and factors in the information and the structure and organization of the page in order to determine the theme of the website. Google Ads’ use keyword contextual targeting and category contextual marketing to identify relevant websites in order to help target related webpages on the display network. BeerMe’s use of Google Ads helps streamline the process of finding related webpages and content and places advertisements accordingly.

Contextual Targeting for BeerMe:

BeerMe being a new brewery in Dublin, Ireland uses contextual targeting in order to help gain new customers by advertising on sites with relevant content. Webpages that are great for BeerMe to advertise on have content that contain, tourism spots, tours, food and drink, Irish made products, and events like pub crawls. It is important to reach new and existing customers so that they are aware of our new products, upcoming events, and news about our brand. Using contextual targeting, BeerMe opens the possibility of partnering with other related brands, products, or services by creating promotional events for both products or services and by allowing BeerMe to advertise on their website, BeerMe may advertise the other brands on their website.