Topics and Keyword Targeting: A Match Made in Heaven

‘Topics’ has become a trend in 2022, as the rise of advanced contextual takes centre stage. This month we explore why.

Contextual 2.0 is taking industry headlines by storm. And for good reason. With the third-party cookie set to sunset by the end of 2023, businesses are seeking new ways to reach the right consumers in the right place. At its simplest, for contextual targeting to work, an advertising system needs to know what your campaign is about so it can place your ads on relevant web pages. And oftentimes, this is done through two key functionalities:

Topics: Broad topics in which a given campaign would fit into, such as fashion, music, food, etc. Selecting a topic makes your ad eligible to run on websites related to your topic. Pretty simple, right?

Keywords: Use for precise targeting within your topics and subtopics. Brands can identify keywords that will help algorithms and machines to match your ad to website content.

Individually, these are useful for a brand no question. But, together, they offer incredible opportunity and scale.

Understanding Keywords.

In the world of data and digital advertising, keywords are like the bricks that build the bridge between campaign content and the advertising marketplace. When it comes to contextual targeting, keywords are still an essential part for advertisers to target the right customers in the right environment, because the solution is largely based on the content. But it doesn’t mean it is the only solution to launch a successful advertising campaign. Nowadays, topic targeting has become even more popular in the market for helping brands to scale their campaigns effectively and efficiently.

The Game Changer: Topics.

Before the launch of ‘topics’ targeting, it was typically a slow process for clients to manually add keywords to create and scale their contextual strategy, which in reality needs hundreds of keywords to be effective. However, topics have become a true game-changer for brands and their agencies as it fundamentally changes how they create contexts for advertising. When brands want to gain scale and increase reach, topics become vital because it removes the laboursome work, and instead allows them to select a number of topics which in turn builds huge scale.

How does this work in practice?

All brands have to do is to start by selecting several topics to target against their general customer segments, and then simply add on different keywords (especially long-tail keywords) to make the campaign more customizable and relevant to other niche but unignorable user scenarios or undetermined potential growth points.

To conclude.

The combination of keywords targeting and topics targeting is legendary, making the combination of customizable and scalable become possible in one single moment. More importantly, 4D is offering full transparency for all the covered keywords behind topics, rather than making it a black box that can not be easily customized or analyzed by advertisers. The performances of keywords individually will be accessible and analyzed by 4D Outcomes for advertisers to easily optimize the campaign performance in one click.

Click here to find out more about 4D today!