Contextual Keyword targeting enables you to refine your campaigns by providing keywords or phrases to have greater control over where your ads are displayed. AdRoll’s proprietary natural language processing model informs BidiQ, our bidding engine, to place or exclude ads on webpages where these keywords appear.
By targeting or excluding specific keywords and phrases, ads can be served on relevant websites containing these keywords. This strategy gives you more control over the content your ads appear next to, increased targeting precision, and ensures brand safety.
Keywords do not require an exact match: we use semantic matching to understand which keywords are contained in the websites where impressions are served. Using semantic matching, we can identify that the keyword "car" is semantically similar to "automobile".
Keywords can be added by either typing them in or uploading a .CSV file with up to 100 keywords per Ad Group. When saving campaigns, please note that there is a combined limit of 100 keywords per Ad Group, which includes both targeted and excluded keywords.
Who can access
Contextual Keyword targeting is available for all AdRoll packages.
| Your AdRoll Plan | Contextual Keyword |
|---|---|
| Ads Only | Included |
| Advanced | Included |
| Agency | Included |
| MAP (Legacy) | Included |
| Starter (Legacy) | Included |
| Growth (Legacy) | Included |
To find your current package, log in to AdRoll and navigate to Settings > Billing & Subscriptions > Plan & Usage.
Where you can use contextual targeting
Contextual Categories & Keywords is available on every campaign objective — Build Awareness, Drive Engagement, and Maximize Conversions. In any ad group, you can apply category and keyword targeting alongside your audience targeting, whichever objective you selected.
The card sits under Ad Groups > Targeting and defaults to All content, so contextual targeting is already active unless you switch it to Specific content. Choosing Specific content gives you two controls, which you can use together or on their own.
We offer a curated list of content categories, letting you target ad placements grouped by theme or industry rather than by individual page text.
- Add one or more categories to Target Categories. Entries are combined with Or, so your ads can run on content matching any of them.
- Use Clear to remove all categories at once.
You provide specific keywords or phrases that AdRoll uses to scan website text. Your ads will then appear on pages where these keywords are present, making your ad relevant to the content being consumed by the user.
- Type a keyword and press Enter to add it, or upload a .CSV.
- For example, if you sell hiking gear, you might use keywords like "mountain trails," "outdoor adventure," or "camping tips."
- Use capitalization for acronyms, proper nouns, and company names to ensure accurate targeting.
Ads run on content that matches any of the categories and keywords you add. The collapsed card summarizes your setup, for example Including 2 categories, 1 keyword. To block content you do not want your ads near, expand Brand safety and suitability > Exclude Keywords.
Related: Contextual Content Categories for Web Channel and CTV Contextual Targeting Content Categories.
Contextual Keyword Supported Languages
Contextual Keywords targeting uses a multilingual model that supports 53 languages.
Automatic Translations from English: When you enter an English keyword (e.g., "fashion"), AdRoll's automatically triggers translations for that keyword in all 53 supported languages. This means your ads will be served on websites containing the word in any of these languages, without you needing to manually input each translation.
This robust language support enables you to effectively connect with diverse linguistic audiences, expanding your campaign's reach and impact.
| Language Code | Language |
|---|---|
| ar | Arabic |
| bg | Bulgarian |
| ca | Catalan |
| cs | Czech |
| da | Danish |
| de | German |
| el | Greek |
| en | English |
| es | Spanish |
| et | Estonian |
| fa | Persian |
| fi | Finnish |
| fr | French |
| fr-ca | French (Canada) |
| gl | Galician |
| gu | Gujarati |
| he | Hebrew |
| hi | Hindi |
| hr | Croatian |
| hu | Hungarian |
| hy | Armenian |
| id | Indonesian |
| it | Italian |
| ja | Japanese |
| ka | Georgian |
| ko | Korean |
| ku | Kurdish |
| lt | Lithuanian |
| lv | Latvian, Lettish |
| mk | Macedonian |
| mn | Mongolian |
| mr | Marathi |
| ms | Malay |
| my | Burmese |
| nb | Norwegian (Bokmål) |
| nl | Dutch |
| pl | Polish |
| pt | Portuguese |
| pt-br | Portuguese (Portugal) |
| ro | Romanian |
| ru | Russian |
| sk | Slovak |
| sl | Slovenian |
| sq | Albanian |
| sr | Serbian |
| sv | Swedish |
| th | Thai |
| tr | Turkish |
| uk | Ukrainian |
| ur | Urdu |
| vi | Vietnamese |
| zh-cn | Chinese (PRC) |
| zh-tw | Chinese (Taiwan) |
Contextual Keyword Best Practices
To maximize the effectiveness of your keyword targeting, consider the following best practices:
- Research Thoroughly: Conduct comprehensive research to identify keywords that are truly relevant to your product/service and resonate with your target audience.
- Be Specific: While broad keywords can increase reach, highly specific keywords often lead to higher relevance and better performance.
- Find the Right Balance: Using keywords will limit the supply of websites on which ads are able to appear on, which may result in increased CPMs. To maintain the greatest and most cost-efficient reach possible, provide relevant keywords that yield a good audience size. We provide an Audience Size Estimator to help you gauge your potential reach.
- Leverage Keyword Exclusions Diligently: Regularly review and update your list of excluded keywords. While it is paramount to prevent your ads from appearing on irrelevant or inappropriate sites, you also want to be cautious of overblocking and limiting opportunities to reach your target audience.
- Monitor and Optimize: Continuously monitor the performance of your keyword-targeted. Analyze which keywords and categories are driving the best results and adjust your strategy accordingly. Remove underperforming keywords and explore new ones.
- Ad Group Organization: Organize your keywords into relevant Ad Groups to maintain structure and facilitate easier management and optimization.
Contextual Keyword Reports
AdRoll offers various metrics and reporting capabilities to help you understand the performance of your campaigns and the keywords under them.
Accessing Keyword Performance Data
To view your keyword performance dashboard, follow these steps:
- Navigate to Campaigns.
- Click on the name of the campaign you wish to check metrics for.
- Scroll down and click Keywords from the tab options (Ads, Categories, Keywords).
To effectively assess your keywords targeted under campaigns, it's important to monitor key performance indicators (KPIs). Here are some of the most widely used metrics:
- Spend: The total cost associated with your ads and emails.
- Impressions: The total number of times your ad was displayed.
- Clicks: The total number of times your ads and emails were clicked.
- CTR (Click-Through Rate): The percentage of ad serves that resulted in a click, calculated as (Clicks / Impressions) * 100.
- CPM (Cost Per Impressions): Your cost for one thousand ad serves, calculated as (Spend / Impressions) * 1000.
- CPC (Cost Per Click): Your average spend for each click, calculated as Spend / Clicks.
- Conversions: The total number of goal completions, which includes both view-through and click-through conversions.
- ROAS (Return on Advertising Spend): Your profit per dollar spent on ads, calculated as (Click Revenue + View Revenue) / Cost.
- Click Throughs (CTC): A goal completion that occurs after someone clicks your ad.
- View Throughs (VTC): A goal completion that occurs after someone views your ad but does not click.
- Click-Attributed Revenue: The total earnings generated when someone clicks your ad and then converts.
- View-Attributed Revenue: The total earnings generated when someone views your ad and then converts.