Good News! Yes, It’s Possible to Prove the Value of Contextual Targeting

Analysis from Dentsu reveals that context is more cost-effective than behavioral

The death of cookies and the rise of privacy regulation promise to put an end to many of the behavioral targeting tactics that have become commonplace for today’s digital marketers. The alternative? Contextual targeting and direct publisher buys are one option, albeit costly. The other is contextual intelligence, which uses programmatic technology to identify contextually relevant pages at a lower CPM.

But what does this shift mean to marketers? Is contextual intelligence really an effective alternative to behavioral targeting? A new analysis conducted by Dentsu and GumGum—“Understanding Contextual Relevance and Efficiency”—ran a rigorous experiment on four live campaigns. The findings are revealing—contextual targeting was more cost-efficient than behavioral targeting. 

See the complete study “Understanding Contextual Relevance and Efficiency: A Comparison of Contextual Intelligence Vendors and Behavioral Targeting”

Key insights include:

  • Contextual intelligence vendor impressions cost 29% less than behaviorally targeted impressions.
  • Accuracy matters, but not all contextual intelligence vendors can achieve it. The study found that 71% of the pages GumGum’s Verity solution selected were relevant, outperforming other vendors by 1.7x.
  • The cost-per-viewable impression was for contextually targeted ads was 41% lower than behaviorally targeted ads.

What is the benchmark of contextual success today? Arm yourself with the first of its kind research study that provides it all—read the full report today.