CONTEXTUAL ADVERTISING: Improve Your PPC Conversion Rate By 62.5%

Contextual Advertising

Contextual Advertising is a relatively new form of advertising on the web that will consider the context of the site, a page or a search query, to display ads from advertisers that correspond to the topic. Its usual form is text-based, using regular hyperlinks, sometimes small graphics and brief descriptions to attract users that may be interested. It is usually highly targetted and is better accepted by users because it is less obstrusive, less bandwith hungry and more relevant than the classic graphical banners. For example, a web page about photography will automatically draw advertisers selling cameras and other photo related accessories. It also has the benefits of making the job of a web publisher easier to find sponsors, as the contextual advertising company acts as an automatic middle man between publishers and advertisers, who bid for specific keywords using an auction system. The same can be said for advertisers, since they now have access to thousands of possible web sites to automatically advertise on. It usually works as Pay per Click, meaning the publisher only generate revenues when a user actively click on an ad, as opposed to Pay per Impressions, an older system that generates revenue based on the number of time the ad is displayed.

Google was on the forefront of this innovation when they created Google Adsense, the first major contextual advertising program. In the beginning, these new ads appeared with their search engine, but they soon expanded it to include webmasters and their web sites, which they named their "Content Network". Using a few ligns of Javascript code, publishers could insert Adsense on their web pages and it would then automatically serve relevant ads using Google's search algorithm. Google also considers other factors such as the geographical location of visitors and their languages, so ads can actually be different for each visitor. Other companies followed with similar programs, but they lacked the sophistication of Adsense since they demanded specific keywords from webmasters instead of detecting them on their pages. Other big players on the web are now slowly embracing this terrific new marketing technology, such as the Yahoo! Publisher Network and MSN adCenter. Contextual Advertising is making it now possible for smaller webmasters and publishers who own small hobby sites to monetize their efforts without spending all their time dealing with appropriate sponsors that may not necessarly be interested with smaller sites when taken on an individual level.

Contextual advertising programs and Google Adsense Alternatives

Here we list companies that offer this marketing solution to webmasters. Google Adsense is often considered the prime choice, but they do have restrictions and some people may be refused to their program.

Saturday, December 20, 2008

Improve Your PPC Conversion Rate By 62.5%

This is not a quick fix so apologies for anyone who thought that a few quick changes would turn their PPC (pay-per-click) campaign around, PPC campaign management just doesn’t work that way. However this stat is highly relevant to anyone who undertakes SEO or PPC advertising.

Click Consult has recently undertaken a comparison of different PPC accounts to reveal a statistic that should make a business re-consider their whole internet marketing strategy. Using a random selection of 20 Click Consult PPC clients, we have been able to compare the conversion rates of clients who do PPC alone to PPC and SEO combined. We found that if you combine the two, your conversion rate on PPC is 62.5% higher on average.

I’m not even going to mention any of the many benefits of undertaking SEO; however we have many other blogs that do if you are interested. However I will point out that if you are currently using PPC advertising and not undertaking SEO then you should definitely consider adding SEO to your marketing strategy. Also if you do currently undertake SEO but do not have a PPC campaign then the benefits of starting a PPC campaign will be increased.

Obviously there are many factors that affect your PPC conversion rate other than the direct affects of SEO on a website. However in this random sample these other factors even each other out because clients with both high and low converting industries and websites were taken into account on both sides.

If I’ve lost you or if you’re not sure what to do with this information then don’t worry just give Click Consult a call and we’ll be happy to go through your internet marketing strategy with you. We offer a full range of services including PPC, SEO, Web Development, Affiliate & Email Marketing and Online PR. We’ll go through how we can benefit your company achieving a quick and high ROI.

NB: In an updated version of this study, a larger sample of clients was used to ensure the integrity of the hypothesis (i.e. that combining PPC and SEO improves conversion rates). For more information on this study, please click here.