Overture Separates Contextual and Search Advertising

January 28th, 2004 by Loren Baker, Editor | 2 Comments

Overture, the Yahoo owned search engine advertising network, is launching a separately-bidded marketplace for its ‘contextual advertising’ product - a move which it claims will earn it more revenue and enable advertisers to bring in more relevant traffic.

Previously, advertisers had to pay the same price-per-click for contextual ads - that is, context-relevant ads served into pages which aren’t generated by users typing queries into search boxes - as they paid for ads on search results pages. Some analysts have observed that contextual ads don’t perform as well as paid-for listings in search results pages in terms of producing conversions, because users exposed to contextual ads are browsing, while search box users are more involved in searching for a product or shopping.

Overture said it’s not reacting to such objections and that the move is part of its ongoing work to give advertisers more control. Separate bidding on its ‘Content Match’ product, the firm argues, will help advertisers work to maximize ROI.

Vote for this post : 0