Contextual keyword library

Megan Dyer, Strategist: Thanks so much for joining our webinar today on our brand new platform feature, contextual keyword targeting. Today, we’re going to cover what contextual keyword targeting is, take a tour of the contextual keyword library, how to implement this tactic in your campaigns, and then finally, we’ll talk about the reporting options that are available.

Contextual keyword targeting is a form of contextual targeting that places ads based on the content of the sites that users are visiting. This strategy differs from contextual category targeting, which places ads based on the category of the site rather than on the actual content of the specific pages.

Contextual keyword targeting pairs really nicely with page search as you can leverage similar terms and serve display ads to people as they are actively seeking out products and services that are similar to yours. The system will scan the content of the Web page and comparison with the list of keywords that you upload to find pages that would be most relevant for your placements. This tactic comes with a minimal data CPM of $0.42, which is much less expensive than most third-party data segments from the data catalogs and therefore makes this tactic a great fit for campaign budgets of all sizes.

Because of the timely element of this tactic and the narrower targeting that it facilitates in targeting keywords, it serves as a good mixture between contextual category and data targeting and often sees high engagement. I’m going to go ahead and share my screen here so that we can take a tour of the library.

Starting out, to access the contextual keyword library, you’ll hover over the Library tab and select “Keyword Lists” from the dropdown. This will take you to your Keyword List dashboard, where you can see the list that you’ve uploaded or add a new one.

To add a new keyword list, click the plus sign on the light gray sub-navigation bar. Give your keyword list a name. Then, you can either add your keywords manually one-by-one with one keyword per line, or you can download our Excel template. Once you download the template, you can either upload it here or you can add your keyword manually by clicking whichever blue add button is relevant based on how you’ve opted to enter these. You’ll want to upload, generally speaking, between 20 to 40 keywords. Fifty is the maximum that we accept. But 20 to 40 is the general recommendation based on how this tactic works.

Once you’ve added those, you can see your keywords here. If you need to remove any, you can do so by clicking the trashcan icon. Finally, you can add any notes here either for internal use only and they only appear on the screen.

Once you have all of your desired keywords here, you can go ahead and click “Save.” This will take you back to the dashboard where you can see your keyword list, click the arrow over here on the left side to expand the keyword list, and see which words are included on your keyword list. You can also click the Edit button if you need to make any edits. These edits are made in real-time, so if you realized that you wanted to add or remove certain keywords, you could certainly do that.

The really important thing to be conscious of here is in this status column, this is going to say pending, which means that the keyword list is still processing. It can take one to two days for the keyword list to process, so please expect generally about 48 hours, hopefully, sooner than that. But the best practice will be to assume 48 hours. Once that keyword list has been processed, you’ll see that it’s updated to a status of ready. You will not be able to add the keyword list to your ad group until the status says ready.

Any time it says pending, it’s just going to be hanging out here and processing. Only once it’s ready are we going to be able to actually use it in our campaign.

Don’t forget, we have these handy tooltips that will give you more information about any of this, link you to our support center, and provide step-by-step instructions on how to leverage this tactic.

Moving on, once we’ve uploaded our keyword list, we can go to our Campaign tab. To add this in our campaign, we would just find our ad group by making a new one or finding an existing one. I’m going to edit this one, and then we will find our custom keyword list in the same section as the contextual categories. There’s not a specific keyword box, but right here in the include categories is where you would be able to search for that keyword list by name. Mine’s not going to show up since I just added it. It’s in pending status, and it hasn’t been processed. But once it was in a status of ready, you would find it here and included in the categories option.

It’s worth noting you can use multiple keyword lists per campaign and they are targeted in a hierarchical order. Much like contextual categories, the keyword list will be targeted in the order in which they’re listed. Generally speaking, you don’t want to mix contextual keywords with categories because contextual category targeting is free. But the $0.42 CPM is applied at the ad group level. So, if I had my keyword list and then also had a category here for dogs, then I would be charged $0.42 on this category, even though it would be free otherwise. Again, generally speaking, keep your ad groups separate for keywords and categories.

Finally, just like with categories, we have this continue bidding adjustment down here. You will want to make sure to set this continued bidding at zero. This tells the system, if I don’t find any inventory within this keyword list, then I do not want to bid on placements outside of this keyword list. That’s super important any time you’re doing contextual targeting so that you’re not bidding on things that you don’t want to be bidding on. Once you have done that, you can just save your ad group.

Moving on to reporting, reporting on the keyword-related ad groups will appear normally in the dashboards and on the exportable reports. It’ll appear at the ad group level. At this time, we do not have keyword-level reporting available, but more granular reports are regular, detailed reports are available upon request via our support center. Those do show performance down to the keywords segment level. They would show up just like a contextual category, it would show up as a segment and you can break it down to the segment level if you’re using multiple keyword segments, but we do not have keyword-level reporting.

Moving on to questions, I see our first one. Can you use phrases or only words? You can use phrases. They don’t have to be enclosing quotes or anything you can just enter “pet store,” the phrase, for example, and that would count as a keyword.

Next question, could you explain the pricing? Again, the pricing is $0.42 CPM. That’s a flat $0.42 rate on any ad group that is using keywords. That pricing is at the add group level, but it’s just that flat $0.42. It’s baked into your media costs that comes out and all of your dashboards will reflect that correctly. It’s effectively a data CPM.

Another question: Is keyword contextual based on the actual content of the loaded page or on the site’s keyword tags? It is based on the content of the page. Our system will actually scan the pages, look at the content, and see if the content is relevant based on the keywords that you’ve uploaded. So, it’s not based on the site’s keywords. That’s what makes it a little more specific and more granular than contextual category, which is based on the publisher-defined category of the website, which of course can vary based on how they have decided to categorize that.

Have a great rest of your day! Feel free to submit any additional questions through the support center.