It used to be that if you wanted to market your product or service, you would have to spend big money for spots on television, radio or even the newspapers. The problem with these, however, is that even if TV or radio shows have their respective target audiences, you’re still not effectively targeting your marketing campaign. With newspapers, your audience would come from a wide array of backgrounds and interests. Hence, your ad campaign would most likely be targeted at an audience too wide to merit attention to your own niche.

You would spend thousands of dollars (sometimes even millions for TV) to get ad space and your rate of return would be quite low and usually difficult to estimate and attribute from actual sales figures.

The advent of contextual advertising schemes, such as Google AdSense and Yahoo! Publisher Network, along with the prevalence of the Web in the developed and developing societies has changed all this. What’s great with all this:

• First, you’re assured that your advertisements would be targeted at the correct audience. Because of contextual sensing, systems like AdSense and YPN detect the appropriateness of keywords on their publishers’ sites, and put out relevant advertisements. Therefore, you as the marketer would be assured that your ads appear at the right places–they are on topic, and not lost in some generic space waiting for random visits from curious clickers.
• Second, you don’t pay unless people click. Yes, mindshare is good, but actual hits, sales, and output are more easily measured and are perhaps better indicators of performance. Contextual advertising systems usually don’t charge you much if people don’t pay your company (or product) site a visit.
• Third, you have control. AdSense and YPN, along with other contextual-ad programmes allow you considerable control over how your ad campaign goes abut. You can specify which exact publisher sites you want to advertise on, your cost limits, and of course you have creative control of your content.
• Lastly, it’s easier to monitor the performance of your ad campaign. Everything’s online and on the Web, after all. You can access a variety of information, from running cost to clickthroughs, to ad impressions with a few clicks of the mouse.

There are many reasons why companies and professionals should go into the contextual advertising route instead of more traditional ones (or perhaps to augment and complement traditional advertising). One of these is cost. Yes, the rate of return is better than traditional advertising, and usually better-measured, too.