Contextual targeting is a type of branding campaign strategy that, as opposed to behavioral targeting, focuses on the content of the page on which your ads appear. This targeting method uses algorithms to target ad placements based on applying natural language processing and semantics to website content and other metadata. Rather than focusing on who sees your ads, contextual is all about where your ads are shown.

When targeting specific contextual categories, think about alongside what content you'd like to advertise your products - this may be content related to your specific industry, but it can also be another similar subject that also interests your target audience.

You can choose from the following top-level categories - each of them contains a set of subcategories that you might narrow your selection to:

Tip: To keep your reach broad, we recommend selecting categories from different top-level segments. Keep in mind that we are using OR logical operator in between the categories you choose to target.

Because contextual is a branding advertising strategy, you can optimize your campaign towards CPM (Impressions) or CPC (Clicks). Of course, you can target a specific goal or use one of the automated options (read more on the Optimization goal value).

Contextual campaign model has a dedicated report showing performance across selected contextual categories - you can find it in a Campaign Report - Audiences.

One impression can be matched to up to 3 different contexts - e.g., an article about preparing for a job interview could be linked to the following contexts from the 'Careers' category: Career Advice, Career Planning, or Job Search. This means that we cannot report on absolute metrics per contextual category, and instead, we can show the share of impressions or clicks that we could match to a targeted contextual category. Other metrics (CPM, CPC, and CTR) represent averages per listed category.