Consumers note the influence of contextual targeting in new study
Contextual targeting has returned to the top of the playbooks of savvy marketers. For one key reason – it works.
Although obscured by the rise of audience and behavioural targeting in recent times, changes to privacy legislation, widely publicised data breaches and consumer-side concerns have seen contextual targeting return to favour.
The latest study conducted by global digital marketing expert, Integral Ad Science (IAS), underlines the importance of utilising contextual targeting to reach and engage consumers, and influence their behaviour.
In the study, IAS revealed that 86% of consumers find it important that advertising is relevant to the content being consumed, while 71% of consumers say their perception of an online ad is impacted by surrounding content on a page.
“In these times of increasing privacy concerns, it’s pleasing to see consumers note the influence of contextually targeted advertising,” says Nicholas Bailly, National Sales Director – Auto OEM at carsales.
“It validates carsales’ long-held belief that contextual targeting is performance- and cost-effective where brands seek to influence the behaviour of consumers.”
“Now, ongoing privacy concerns and government legislation have helped remind many marketers of its power and relevance.”
Brand safety concerns rise
Brand safety still remains a major issue for online advertisers. In fact, according to B&T, ad misplacement incidents rose by 55% across the Asia Pacific in 2019, with Australia experiencing the highest level of brand safety issues – over 10%.
“Brand safety and ad misplacement is a challenging issue for advertisers in the current social and political environment. Advertisers on social media platforms and news destinations run the risk of featuring their brand and message among negativity, noise and questionable, click-bait content,” says Bailly.
“There’s no doubt that this can impact advertising effectiveness and how the advertiser is perceived by the consumer.”
Indeed, in research commissioned by Reuters, 77% of consumers say that advertising next to ‘unsavoury or objectionable’ stories can damage their perception of a brand and 62% believe that brands have full control of where their advertising appears.
However, in good news for auto advertisers partnering with carsales, the IAS study revealed that consumers recognised the impact of contextually targeted ads on their perception of brands.
The IAS study reports that 66% of consumers have a more favourable opinion of brands with contextually relevant ads, while 69% are likely to remember a contextually relevant ad.
The results of IAS study reinforce carsales’ automotive-specific findings into the power of context on Australia’s #1 for cars.
In an Australian first, carsales commissioned Nielsen to compare the campaign performance of automotive advertisers, both on the carsales network and in non-contextual digital environments, with the aim to better understand the effect that relevant context has on key brand metrics.
The study findings validated the effectiveness of carsales as a premium contextual automotive environment. The context of carsales positively shifted brand metrics for automotive brands and increased Active Recommendation by 50%.
“carsales is a high engagement, clutter-free destination with independent automotive content that Australians trust and use to take direct action,” Bailly says.
“This content is one of the key pillars that helps carsales maintain consumer attention more than 2x times longer than the nearest auto competitor – presenting brands with an effective opportunity to reach, engage and influence consumers shopping a new car.”
“carsales offers advertisers everything they require to achieve leading brand marketing results including contextual targeting, relevance at scale, trustworthy content, quality data, locally-developed ad formats and a premium user experience,” Bailly concludes.
