There’s a new wave in the online advertising community.  It goes by several names – Web 3.0, semantic targeting, and semantic advertising being a couple of the more popular ones.  The inspiration behind semantic targeting is pretty simple – it’s (yet another) Google AdSense, just one that happens to be better targeted than its predecessors.   Semantic targeting is pretty self explanatory –  ads are placed according to the meaning of an entire web page as opposed to being placed according to specific matching keywords.  For example, an ad for footwear being placed on a news story about, say, some guy with broken or crushed feet would be slightly counterproductive.  Also, with traditional advertising networks there are many phrases or keywords that are a bit ambiguous – like Amazon (as in the jungle versus the online retailer).  Improving advertisement relevance is never a bad move.  Improved accuracy ultimately means more clicks for those advertisers, and more visibility.  So as far as general online advertising goes (and PPC advertising in particular), it’s a step in the right direction.  And I’m seeing it mentioned more and more frequently, so it’s clearly becoming more standard than it was, say, five years ago.
To be honest, I’m not a huge advocate of PPC advertising.  Yes, it is an easily tracked advertising methodology, and it may appear to give you tangible numbers to report back to the big guys upstairs.  Having said that, those tangible numbers do not necessarily indicate tangible results.  Traffic from PPC ads does not mean higher revenue from your website.  Firstly, I know of very few internet users who actually click on PPC ads, and of those few, even fewer clicks ultimately lead to conversions.
To my mind, the issue at hand is the blatancy of PPC advertising.  Subtlety is crucial; decent marketing can produce huge quantities of revenue, but people don’t like being advertised to.  The key to successful internet marketing is subtlety, a characteristic which is getting more and more difficult to achieve every passing day.  Firstly, internet users have much more savvy these days and are much quicker to pick up on marketing efforts, and secondly, the rules are getting steadily more stringent.  For example, the FDA made it quite clear that any bloggers who are writing paid reviews without disclosing this fact to the public will be in BIG trouble.  As will those who paid for the review.
So I guess my point is if you have to blatantly advertise your product or service instead of subtly marketing it, semantic targeting just may be the way to go, because accuracy and relevance may be all you have left.
Note:  Search in general has been getting more semantic – Google’s starting to look at synonyms differently.  More on that later.

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