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Defining and Targeting Audiences Using Context

Writer's picture: Advanced ContextualAdvanced Contextual

Updated: Jan 14

We are always thinking about what contextual means and how to best use it to define and target an audience.  Contextual analysis is simply understanding the pages that people are reading when they’re at a particular task.  It sounds simple, and, in concept, it is.  


For the entire history of contextual analysis including today, most contextual analysis occurs by assigning keywords to domains or pre-categorizing channels of domains into one segment that can be targeted.


We think these approaches fall apart in terms of accurately defining an audience. If you assign keywords to a domain then you assume that every page under that publisher’s domain is about the same keywords.  Clearly, that’s not the case.  If you group sections into a contextual segment for health, then you’re assuming that each page is also about the same thing.  Also, demonstrably not true.  We realized that the problem we had to solve was how to not think about the context of domains or channels and only think about pages that are similar.  That led us to our platform innovation.  


We decided our customers would be best served if we could look at content at the individual article level and with more granularity than a traditional keyword approach could provide.  Our initial response to that challenge was to build an engine which could process billions of pages at the rate of 1,000,000 impressions per second.  


Our second solution was to build an AI topic model with extensive keyword capabilities so we could understand both the topic of the page and the keywords on that page. This allowed us to to easily allow and block any keyword that creates noise and waste; it allowed us to better tune a segment for performance.  Finally, we can filter attributes of content such as tone and sentiment.  Our topic model provides dependable guard rails and the keywords create additional performance.


The combination of looking at content consumption at the page level, with the granularity of both topic and keyword analysis was an effective solution for our clients.  Rather than provide an inclusion list of domains or channels with a few keywords attached, we began making segments with extensive lists of individual content pages (urls) from many publishers which had similar topics and keywords.


It’s a very practical solution that scales and performs.  We know it scales and performs since our brand and agency customers continue to spend more and add brands to their business with us.  We have a brand customer retention rate of greater than 70% with customers which have used us for three or more years.  


We also made it a very efficient exercise.  Our tools don’t require anyone to be keyword or search engine experts nor does it require extensive tables of allowed or blocked keywords.  We figured that simple is better; We understand how the system works and can explain it to clients.


When we create a segment, we have to find pages with similar topics. Our first step is to we feed our engine several seed articles. We’ve got topic classifications on about 3.5 billion individual article pages so when we put the seed pages into the engine, it searches the article database and finds all the pages where the topics match.  Now we have the basis of a segment which can have thousands or millions of pages that match the topics.


The second step is to understand and adjust the keywords that appear on the pages with similar topics. Together, with our clients, we share the keywords in the articles we think are relevant. Once we’ve shared the keyword analysis and gotten their feedback, we adjust the number of keywords in the segment, both included and excluded.


Between these two processes our brand and agency customers now have a scaled, well defined audience they can target in a number of ways.  And it works.  With a large, enterprise software company we deliver audiences with higher engagement than any publisher on the plan, which is their main KPI.  In travel we deliver a premium audience for a luxury hotel measured by a consistently low cost per visit with high ROAS.  


Contextual becomes increasingly important as platform changes and privacy laws put pressure on traditional targeting in digital and social media.  With less data available due to new laws and a push by platforms to eliminate user guided targeting, we provide a scale and performant option for brands to define and target an audience across multiple media channels.

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