How To Target The Right Customer With Contextual Marketing

This is a guest post by Emilia Johansson.

There are two schools of thought about placing affiliate ads on a website. One says that you should choose popular affiliate programs because people are more comfortable making a purchase with a well-known company. The other school of thought says that you should choose less-common affiliate programs because this will make your site stand out from other sites and it’s much easier to reach a specific consumer base.

The best model is somewhere in the middle: both popular affiliate programs and those programs that target a niche market. What makes contextual advertising so useful is that it targets specific consumers. The “right” consumer is one who is looking to make a purchase. Whatever school you choose to follow you should do some research first and compare affiliate programs available on the Internet.

To put it another way, you’re not just looking for traffic, but traffic that is interested in spending money. What makes contextual advertising particularly effective is that it tailors affiliate ads to every web surfer. The result is that even if the surfer was looking for information, rather than a product, he still might make a purchase. The purchase might even be one that is unrelated to his original search.

Targeting Consumers With Contextual Advertising

The best way to convert traffic into profit is to ensure that your web content and contextual ads link up. A surfer may only be looking for information on a certain topic, rather than a specific service. That said, the more attractive your affiliate offers, and the more those offers are tailored to both the surfer’s core interests and past browsing history, the better chance the traffic will convert into dollars. Take in consideration that you should be genuinely interested in the niche you’re going to get yourself into. If education is what you’re interested in, you should choose a good education affiliate program.

So, the answer is to mix and match your contextual advertising with web content, PPC campaigns and a variety of contextual advertising methods. Some contextual advertising will change only according to content. Other contextual advertising will rely on past browsing history, regardless of the content on the current page.

The latter makes it more difficult to brand the website as being focused on a particular topic, but it can lead to conversions. The method you use depends on the nature of your affiliate site. It may take some experimentation with the types of contextual advertising, plus the keywords you target in both content and PPC programs.

Contextual Advertising With Google

While Google AdSense has cornered the market on contextual advertising, these ads are so rampant that people commonly ignore them. So, while it’s not a bad idea to include Google ads on a website, you should look to other sources.

Targeting consumers isn’t just about the content of the ads, but also the type of ad, and Google AdSense may just clutter up your site with no conversions. This is not true of every site, however, but your contextual advertising program shouldn’t start and end with the most popular Ad program on the market.

This was a guest post from Emilia Johansson of AffiliateTips.com, an affiliate directory where you can find and compare affiliate programs.

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