Study: Showing in context ads more efficient

A new study is out that indicates advertising in context is much more efficient than showing ads out of context. According to the Online Testing eXchance ads that are contextually relevant to the content on a webpage outperform ads that are not relevant.

by Kristina Knight

OTX studied 600 men and women between the ages of 18 and 65 for the study.

OTX tested ads from an electronics manufacturer on three different types of websites: a consumer electronics site, the opinion section and the technology section of an online newspaper. The ad performed best on the technology page of the online newspaper. Consumers had better ad recognition and brand recognition after seeing the ad.

The ad had very similar results when viewed on the consumer electronics website but showed little value when viewed in the opinion section of the newspaper site.

Researchers concluded that ads shown in context, either because of the content on a specific webpage or because of a contextually relevant website, perform much better than out of context advertising.

“This study demonstrates that context definitely matters, and selecting the page where the online advertising appears is much more important than simply selecting an appropriate website,” says Anand Subramanian, CEO of ContextWeb, which commissioned the study.