Smargeting Your Business With Smarter Targeting

Most would agree that contextual advertising is a mainstay of targeting.

In the perfect scenario, you've managed to establish your very own context by promoting a niche that visitors actually come to your pages for.


But since that's an exception rather than a rule, contextual advertising does, in theory, at least target visitors with advertising geared to their interests.

What's more, if you really want to optimize your earning opportunities, you'll carry out contextual research for your online content, too.

Let's say, for example, that you're running a food and wine site and want to write a new article on wine. You happen to know a lot about German whites, but by using a keyword tool to check the term 'white wines', you'll notice that 'California white wine' is currently the highest-paying keyword phrase - much more so than its German equivalent.

Which means you've found an ideal topic, since any contextual ads generated by your content are likely to be the highest payers. And while you're at it, you may as well check out a few other good earners, too. A pretty wise smargeting move, right?

Maybe not. Consider the following scenario.

Your visitor - a regular - hasn't yet turned up at your site. They're intending to stop by, but right now they're viewing a blog. It's also about food and wine because after all, that's their main interest.

There's an ad at the top of the page for Californian white wines, which happens to tie in nicely with the entry they're reading. Elsewhere in the blog, they notice an ad for Belgian chocolates.

They decide to switch to your site, keen to check out some recipes.

They immediately notice an ad on the homepage. It's the one they've just seen for the Californian wine producer. And oddly enough, your feature article is similar to the one they've just read.

No worries - your visitor clicks through to the recipe page and starts scanning the latest content. Then they notice an ad for Belgian chocolate. It's in a slightly different format, but otherwise the same one they glanced at just a few minutes ago. This is almost starting to get a little irritating, and your visitor can't help wondering why they're seeing the same ads over again.

Of course, the answer in this case is because you and your rival publisher were being smart - or so you thought - with optimized keyword content. Realistically, no two sites are likely to choose exactly the same topics, but even if you're not expressly manipulating keywords, this kind of scenario is growing increasingly common.

Users surf from site to site according to their interests. And if they visit one or more sites about the same kind of subject, there's a high chance they'll come across the same ads, too.

After all, that's exactly what contextual advertising is about. And even the largest advertising networks only have a limited amount of ads to share across a rapidly growing number of affiliated sites. All of which means that, sooner or later, visitors with specific interests will encounter advertising on your site they've seen many times before.

So how do we tackle this?

While waiting for the wider use of behavioral targeting (which evades the issue by serving different ads to different users) you're not going to abandon contextual ads altogether, because they do work - just less efficiently as time goes by.

The smargeting answer is to review the idea of context and prise it open. To take another look at what you're offering and see if you can push things a little bit further.

In other words, it's time to start thinking again about your average user profile. What else is likely to make them tick?

In fact, coming up with ideas may be a lot less difficult than you think. Take, for example, our food and drink site. There's a good possibility that visitors are also interested in tableware; products such as dinner services, glasses or cutlery.

Perhaps they like to hold dinner parties? If so they might also be keen on services such as professional flower arrangements for the table. Or specialty cleaning products - those red wine stains can be tricky to remove. And then, of course, there's the whole area of food preparation itself. Kitchen and cookery utensils or even white goods such as fridges, dishwashers.

Get the idea? Not only have you found yourself several potentially valuable niches - segments, almost - within your food and wine sector, you've also discovered a way to vary the monotony of your regular, over-exposed advertising with new and unexpected messages.

It's the smargeting way to fight increasing ad blindness - and again, it could be worth investigating different ad types to showcase such content (a mini-mall could be just the thing for those kitchen products, for instance).

Don't forget to check how well your strategies are working. You might be surprised just how far your smargeting can take you.

By: Mike Brennan

Article Directory: http://www.articledashboard.com

Mike is an SEO consultant and internet content writer. He is the publisher of clickspiration.com and He is the publisher of clickspirationcasino.com, affiliate directories with a difference. He also writes frequently for simplersteps.com, a growing portal of clear and simple information.

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