Banner advertising is very popular with pay per click (PPC) advertisers; the ability to broadcast an ad in many places related to the ad is a very tempting offer. If you have ever owned a Google Adwords™ account, you will know that a large mass of clicks come from banner or contextual advertising. When advertising on search engines, you are paying for your text advert to be positioned in the search engine results, but contextually based advertisements can be placed anywhere online. As attractive as that sounds to the advertiser, is it really such a good idea?

Contextually based ads are spread to any website that the advertising agency (or search engine) considers being congruent with the ad. As accurate as this can be, it may be able to very well result in adverts being misplaced on non-relevant information WebPages, more often than not, on compatible informational sites. It makes sense to advertise where information is relevant, like an informational site, but if the end-user is looking at material about a product usually they are, regularly, not ready to buy it. Of course this is not true for every field, and in some cases (when marketing to high school students for example) contextual based adverts can be very beneficial.

In most cases where you are selling a physical product, service online, or online product, search engine distributed adverts give a much better response. With a long tail keyword list, that is, a very specific group of keywords targeted at buyers in that specific topic, the conversion rates can be extremely high on search engine positioned ads. The conversion rate of contextually based ads has been proven to be significantly lower than its search based counterpart. Simply, this means a lot of clicks and not many sales. The search engines know this and put a lower price per click per contextually based ad.

Google’s contextual ad broadcasting system is a system called Google Adsense™. It is complementary to Google Adwords™ and displays those ads that are created within each Adwords™ campaign with contextual advertising enabled. Every site with Google Adsense™ is “spidered" for content relevancy, and once the topic and keywords have been pulled from the site, it displays the appropriate ads. For the majority of the time this is pretty well correct. But if the content is very generic or does not contain the suitable keywords and lexical words, it could very well display something unrelated.

When advertising on pay per click, patience is a vital key. Putting up an ad campaign and expecting thousands of clicks in a day only works in some fields, and without contextual advertising you may only get a few clicks through to your site. The majority of the time it is going to be a few weeks before you see results, that is, without good keyword research. With the correct keywords you can see a sale within minutes or hours.

So how do you choose what is right for your particular campaign? Generally if you want to have more targeted traffic and create sales only use search engine placement, and turn off contextual advertising. If you are trying to create awareness contextual based advertising is a great way to do that.