Display Advertising - Does Contextual Relevancy Make a Difference?

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Editor, MarketingSherpa

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Marketing Pilgrim

New Study Commissioned by Google Demonstrates That Contextual Relevancy Affects Ad Value

Advertisers are faced with many options when it comes to spending their advertising dollars online. When offering targeting options, ad networks can argue that ads which match the content of a web page affect the reader differently than out-of-place ads. A new study commissioned by Google examines high-level business-to-business (B2B) purchasers and the effectiveness of targeted Internet advertising as it relates to brand, messaging and recall.

Key findings from the study included:

The test readers’ intent to purchase a particular brand, a key success indicator, is lifted by 24% with relevant ads. But a non-relevant placement leads to a 12% drop in purchasing intent for that brand – meaning a non-relevant placement can actually hurt the advertiser’s bottom line.

When it comes to remembering the actual message of an ad, users were 52% more likely to recall the details of the ad’s message when they were fed a contextually relevant ad as opposed to a non-relevant one.
Interestingly, the study’s findings show that non-relevant ads stick out more than their relevant counterparts. Users were 16% more likely to temporarily remember a non-relevant ad, likely due to the “surprise factor” of it being out of context. However, when it comes to actual impact as measured in higher purchasing intent, the contextually relevant ads showed higher value.

About the study

Google commissioned Enquiro to conduct the B2B online advertising study as it sought to quantify the impact of contextual relevancy for display ads. The test was conducted with 100 executive-level B2B purchasers, and had subjects read two articles on a major online publisher’s site: one with contextually relevant B2B ads, the other with contextually non-relevant ones. Each session utilized an eye tracker to measure how readers looked at the page elements and included an exit survey to measure the effectiveness of the advertisement and its messaging.