Putting Contextual Targeting in Context

During my recent display campaign engagements with 6sense customers, some of the most asked questions revolve around Contextual Targeting. Although contextual targeting has been used in the digital advertising space for some time, it is a new display capability for the 6sense Platform and as a concept for ABX overall. Typical questions range from: What is contextual targeting? How is it different from the campaigns I've been running in 6sense, and when and how should I use it within my existing ABX display strategy? 

To answer these questions and provide strategic guidance, come with me as I provide some context to Contextual Targeting

What Is Contextual Targeting?

Let’s start at the beginning by defining what contextual targeting is. As I mentioned earlier, contextual targeting has been around for a while now. Chances are that you have received this type of advertising thousands of times over your web-browsing lifetime. 

Contextual targeting is the advertising method whereby you can deliver your ads to specific web pages and websites where the content on those pages aligns with targeted topics of interest to your brand or product. This type of advertising is very valuable because it allows you to get your ads in front of viewers when they are actively doing topically relevant research.

How Is Contextual Targeting Different from the Advertising You’ve Been Doing Through 6sense?

Traditionally, display campaigns through 6sense utilize two methods: 

·      Profile-based advertising, where the 6sense Graph will identify and reach key personas (based on their job function and organizational level) and connect them to an account in a target segment; and 

·      Behavioral advertising done via 6sense’s Retargeting Campaign. Whether it is firmographic and industry criteria, keyword research, 3rd party or peer-to-peer review websites, or your own website, MAP, and CRM interaction data, profile-based and behavioral advertising targets the type of accounts you want to engage with. 

These campaigns are designed to target the key personas within your target account segment and reach them almost everywhere/anywhere across the internet, regardless of the site's content or relevance to your brand. To complement these display efforts, Contextual targeting campaigns can use an additional layer of targeting specificity, requiring not only that they match the right audience, but that the audience is engaging with content that is relevant to the topics you want to engage around.

How Can You Use Contextual Targeting Within Your ABX Display Strategy?

Now that we understand the difference between contextual, profile-based, and behavioral, and how they target key personas differently, you might be wondering how to incorporate them into one ABX display strategy. Generally, I recommend taking advantage of both advertising methods' strengths. 

Using Contextual Targeting is a good idea when you want to deliver highly specific content and think you can regularly reach a target audience engaging with key topics. (Please be aware this may reduce reach rates & pacing.) In addition, contextual targeting offers another way to advertise to an audience that might be hard to reach by profile-targeting, like in EMEA due to GDPR privacy restrictions. Finally, contextual targeting may also be effective in engaging with accounts in the later buying stages or bottom of the funnel where you are offering more specific content that may align clearly to research activity. As a quick side note, you still want to incorporate ABX profile-based targeting within your contextual targeting campaigns to ensure that your ads are reaching your GTM audiences. 

Best Practice while running Contextual and Profile based advertising.

If you plan to run both advertising methods to the same audience, consider using contextual targeting to deliver uniquely relevant messaging to specific content sites (just be sure that you’ve set up your campaign bid spend so that it will win ad placements on those sites), and use profile-based advertising to run broader messaging to the same audience on other sites. 

If you want to learn more about how you can use contextual advertising, talk to your CSM, or get in touch with the 6sense strategic advisory team at  strategicadvisory@6sense.com  or keep checking back here on RevCity as we will post more assets to assist you with contextual advertising and your overall display strategy.