You may be familiar with Google AdSense, the first major contextual advertising platform and still probably most widely used on the Internet today, although Yahoo! Publisher network as well as MSN AdCenter and others are gaining more popularity as well. Content (some times also called contextual) advertising involves of placing necessary code on your website where the ads will appear. The service provider such as AdSense, matches available ads to the content of your site and displays them in designated area.
As you may have already noticed I have made a distinction between Content and Contextual (In Text) advertising in the title of this article. On my website, as well as on many other websites, you can see a different kind of advertising. Even in this article you see certain words are yellow color and underlined. If you point your mouse over those words, an ad will pop-up with the advertising that matches that word. This new way of “in text” advertising is gaining in popularity rather quickly.
I would like to talk about tow companies (Kontera and Clicksor) that deliver this kind of advertising solutions.
Kontera, uses a product called ContentLinkâ„¢, which in essence finds contextually relevant keywords on your website and automatically matches them to relevant ads in their system. It takes about three days for your website(s) to be approved and just one piece of javascrit code which can be either placed on any page of your website. If your website generates particular pages dynamically, the best place to paste your code will be a common file for each page such as footer. Kontera does not require and “exclusive” relationship and you can run their ads in addition to other ads your site is already displaying.
Clicksor, a Canadian based company, offers a publishing solution where you can display the ads from advertisers similarly to AdSense ads, contextually (in text) and pop-under. Personally I am against any kind of pop-up or pop-under ads and do not sue them on my websites. With Clicksor I use only “on site” ads, both content and contextual. When registering with Clicksor, you site is reviewed by the editorial team before you can start serving advertising on your site. Once approved you will be able to configure your ads to match the look and feel of your site. Also Clicksor offers you an opportunity to set your own prices for the ads that are purchased specifically for your website.