ClickZ: Contextual Advertising, Part 1 of 2

ClickZ's Fredrick Marckini argues that contextual advertising is part of consumers' inquiry process, which isn't limited to search engine queries. I agree that people start educating themselves about a topic online before they do related search engine queries. You have to know what it is you want before you can look for it. In that process, contextual ads give advertisers an earlier exposure within the sales cycle. It's true that advertisers report their contextual ads get lower click-throughs relative to pure search placements, but this may be where building awareness really counts.

Were Google to provide its advertisers a holistic vision of what users do from early discovery to closing a purchase, the company would be in a much better position to make the case for contextual advertising and - heaven forbid - keyword-based branding. I'm all for an Always-Be-Closing mindset, but let's face it, you're not going to shorten a B2B sales cycle or big consumer expense such as a car to a matter of days and a couple of search engine clicks. You need to feed the top of your sales funnel and that's where I see contextual ads play a significant role, along with rich media.