Contextual advertising or targeted advertising is the term applied to advertisements appearing on websites or other media, such as content displayed in mobile phones, where the advertisements are selected and served by automated systems based on the content displayed to the user.

Google AdSense was the first major contextual advertising program. It worked by providing webmasters with JavaScript code that, when inserted into web pages, called up relevant advertisements from the Google inventory of advertisers. The relevance was calculated by a separate Google bot that indexed the content of the page.

Contextual advertising has made a major impact on earnings of many websites. As the ads are more targeted they are more likely to get clicked, thus generating revenue for the owner of the website. A large part of Google's earnings are from their share of the contextual ads served on the millions of webpages running the Adsense program.

Advertising on a Web site that is targeted to the specific individual who is visiting the Web site. A contextual ad system scans the text of a Web site for keywords and returns ads to the Web page based on what the user is viewing, either through ads placed on the page or pop-up ads. Learn more about this with the houston website design.

For example, if the user is viewing a site about sports, and the site uses contextual advertising, the user might see ads for sports-related companies, such as memorabilia dealers or ticket sellers. Visit the houston website design for more details about Contextual advertising.

Contextual advertising also is used by search engines to display ads on their search results pages based on what word the users has searched for.

Contextual advertising has attracted some controversy through the use of techniques such as third-party hyperlinking, where a third-party installs software onto a user's computer that interacts with the browser by turning keywords on a Web page into links that lead to advertisers that are paying the Web site to advertise on its pages. A contextual ad is the advertisement that dynamically appears on a Web site. If you want more information about internet marketing methods and marketing, then visit the houston website design.