Web Contextual Targeting Campaigns

Contextual Targeting Campaigns for Web help you increase brand awareness by showcasing your ads alongside content that matters to your ideal customer.

You can choose from our curated content categories and enter custom keywords that are relevant to your industry or target market to determine the best web and app placements that align with your brand's message, product offering, and your ideal customer interests.

Launch a new Contextual Targeting Campaign

• Log in to AdRoll and go to Campaigns > Ads on the left side navigation menu.
• Click Create and select Ad Campaign.
• Select Contextual Targeting as your Marketing Goal and click Next.
  
• Choose a clear Campaign Name to easily identify it in AdRoll reports and dashboards. We recommend using a consistent naming convention.
• Under Campaign Settings > Channel confirm your Contextual Targeting Campaign should run on Web and click Done to move to the next step. Learn where do we serve Web ads here.

Choose a Campaign Schedule

Choose your Campaign Schedule and click Done to move to the next step

• Start immediately upon approval or select a future date/time.
• End on a specific date/time or run indefinitely.
• Campaigns must run for a minimum of 5 consecutive days.
• If selecting a specific time of the day, it will be set in Coordinated Universal Time (UTC).
• Upon campaign submission, there will be a review period of up to 48hrs before going live.

Choose a Bidding Strategy

Choose your Bid Strategy and click Done to move to the next step.

• We suggest using Impressions as your bid strategy for top of funnel Contextual Targeting campaigns.
• We suggest skipping Advanced Options and launch your campaign with AdRoll's default settings. Click here to learn how to customize Day Partying, Frequency Capping, General Exclusions.

Configure your First AdGroup

By default your campaign will have one AdGroup called AdGroup 1. AdGroups are containers within your campaign to serve different ad sets to different audience segments with custom schedules, content categories and keywords. You can't set individual budgets for each AdGroup.

• Choose an AdGroup Name to easily identify it in different reports and dashboards.
• Optionally, use a Custom AdGroup Schedule if running multiple AdGroups at different times. If toggled off the AdGroup follows the general campaign schedule.

Choose your Web Audience Location

Choose your Web Audience Location by including countries, states/regions, cities, or zip codes. You can also apply exclusions. In the example below we are targeting the United States, excluding the state of Hawaii.

The Audience Size Estimator will indicate the audience is too narrow until you continue to the next step adding categories and keywords.

Target by Categories

Select specific content categories to show your ads on pages that match our curated categorization.  Click here to view all available Content Categories for Web Contextual Campaigns.

Entering multiple categories uses OR logic, expanding your audience size.

Once you target by Categories in an AdGroup the option to enter Keywords will be greyed out. If you want to layer both Categories and Keywords, create a second Ad Group, for example:

• Ad Group 1: Category = Fashion & Beauty - Bridal
• Ad Group 2: Keyword = wedding

This approach uses OR logic, targeting both audiences within the same campaign.

Target by Keywords

Your ads are displayed on websites and apps that align with the content you've specified through targeted keywords, ensuring they appear in contexts that are relevant to your audience.

Entering multiple keywords uses OR logic, expanding your audience size.

• You can enter any keyword you want, up to a maximum of 100 keywords per AdGroup.
• You can upload a CSV file with keywords in the first column of the file with no header. Each keyword should be in its own cell. 
• Use capitalization for acronyms and proper nouns, and companies.
• Keywords do not require an exact match: we use a NLP model 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".
• If we believe you a keyword has a spelling or capitalization issue we will highlight it in yellow.

Confirm your Estimated Audience Size

After adding content categories or keywords, the Audience Size Estimator will indicate the audience is too narrow until you continue to the next step adding categories and keywords.

Select Environments

We recommend using the default setting Automatically to maximize your reach across Desktop, Mobile Web, and Mobile App and cover 100% of traffic.

Alternatively you can adjust your campaign to serve ads only on specific environments:

• Desktop: Larger screen real estate for more detailed ad content and different user behavior and intent compared to mobile platforms.
• Mobile Web: Broader reach across various websites and lower barrier to entry and often more budget-friendly. Excellent for brand awareness campaigns and contextual targeting.
• Mobile Apps: Immersive ad formats like interstitials.

Select your Ads and Creative Guidance

• You can choose existing ads from your Ad Library, Create new Web ads and Native Ads on the spot, Upload Ads, or requests a free ad set* from us.
• If you want to use multiple ad sets we recommend using different AdGroups.
• At a minimum add the 6 recommended Web Sizes. Adding more sizes boosts your reach.
• Expand your reach by adding Native ads that appear natively on a site or feed or Video Web ads.
• For brand awareness campaigns, use high-level branding and lifestyle images to attract new customers. These ads aim to introduce your brand and encourage exploration, while retargeting campaigns focus on conversions.

Choose your budget and Payment method

Enter your daily budget, billing information and click Done.

• Your budget will be automatically allocated among your AdGroups by BidIQ.

Once you're done setting your campaign, scroll up to the top of the page and click Submit. You can also click Finish Later to save your campaign as a draft.

Campaign Success Metrics

Contextual targeting is part of our Brand Awareness solution, aimed at reaching new audiences unfamiliar with your brand.

These campaigns usually yield fewer direct conversions (last-touch) than retargeting, focusing instead on attracting high-quality new customers for future retargeting.

Below are the metrics we recommend using to measure the success of your campaign:

• New Visitors: Number of new people who came to your site after clicking an ad, who had never been to your site.
• Engaged Visitors: Number of visitors who viewed at least 3 pages after clicking an ad.

• Daily Frequency (Web Campaigns): Number of ads seen per day (impressions) by reached users. 

• Impressions: When an ad is served.

• Reached Users: Unique users reached.