By Navamani Pradeepan
Contextual advertising is a modern marketing concept. There are plenty of terms that marketers frequently use for their marketing activities like Advertisement, promotion, online marketing, branding; public relation, direct marketing and customization and also probably all customers are familiar with this terms. But there are many terms in marketing that customers may not know but have knowledge about the concept. Contextual advertising is one of great example for that. All internet users meet contextual ads every day but, in fact, they may not know what is contextual advertising is.
Contextual advertising or contextual marketing is a form of internet marketing. Contextual advertising is an advertising that displayed on the web pages or mobile devices based upon user’s recent web browsing activity. Eg. A customer wants to know about new model mobile phones and the ticket prices to fly Bangalore. Then he visits flight service website and to particular mobile phone’s website. Afterword he checks news sites and then ads displays alongside the news about online ticket booking or new mobile phones features or even about the hotels in Bangalore where we can spend our holiday. This is called contextual advertising. Contextual ads appear on the web pages automatically but the specialty is that ads are reflect our willingness or interest or needs. Therefore, these ads draw customer’s attention very quickly. Apart from that when a visitor doesn’t click on the advertisement, after few minutes it’s chanced automatically and shown other similar ads. In marketing this is called behavioral targeting.
How it works?
A Contextual advertising system scans the text that a user type in search engines and displays ads on the webpages as pop-up ads based on user’s keyword. The ads themselves are selected and displays automatically on websites based on users search and other online activity and computer software enables the ads to be placed across thousands of websites. It considers the geographic location and language.
Contextual advertising network
Google AdSense was the first and major contextual advertising network. Even though advertisers’ first choice is Google AdSense, there are many contextual advertising network available who provide the similar service to customer, On the other hand we can say the alternative of Google AdSense. eg. Adbrite, Bidvertiser, ,chitiko eminimolls , clicksor, kandoodle ,vibrant media intellTXT ,vibrant media smartad, Yahoo 
publisher network.
The role of Contextual advertising in online advertising
On time advertisement is the advertisement that organizations use Internet to introduce the brands and provide information to a customer. Mainly online advertising involves in 3 components. 1. Creating of the ads, 2. Deciding where the ads to be run, 3 Arranging how the ad is paid for. Contextual advertising plays second role that the place where ads to be display. It reduces the difficulties of advertisers from select which website should show their ads.
Who are targeted audience?
Contextual advertising is more appropriate for the people who are spend more time in online or connected to the Internet through mobile devices, in fact, online users are probably not thinking about that they are providing information to contextual marketing when they are using search engine for search something or read articles or news or even click on ads. Internet user’s online activities are recorded by cookies and tracks the activities of users.
Contextual advertising displays
The Contextual advertising appears on social media, news websites and mobile devices. Search engines also show advertisements on their search results pages based on the text. As well as the contextual advertising is doing its job without interrupting users, they simply go on with their 
online activities.