Help Center Manage Your Account Ad Targeting using Restrictions

Target Keywords

By setting up keyword targeting for an ad, you can choose to show or hide this particular ad when the tag contains keywords parameter. There are two components to setup keyword targeting: add target keywords to an ad and add input keywords into the tag.

Example

  • Ad A has two keywords "travel" and "California"
  • Ad B has two keywords "travel" and "Florida"
  • Ad C has one keyword "job"
  • If the tag has keyword "job", only ad C is selected
  • If the tag has keyword "travel", ad A or ad B is selected

Setup

  • Create ad(s) and then tag them with relevant keywords. To tag keywords to an ad: click on an ad name, click on the "Restrictions" tab, then add a new restriction type called "Target Keywords"
  • After the ads are tagged with keywords, link them to a zone and generate the tag for that zone. Targeting keywords must be appended (manual or automatic) to the tag via the keywords parameter
  • Manual: enter target keywords into the Custom Parameters field in the tag wizard
  • Auto: use JavaScript or your own server-side programming, to systematically append keywords to the ad request. This approach requires technical integration with your database/system. For example: if a web page is about food and burger, your content management system can append the keyword parameter like this "&keywords=food+burger"
<script src="https://g.adspeed.net/ad.php?do=js&zid=XXXX&oid=YYYY&keywords=food+burger" type="text/javascript" ></script>

Target Keywords

Show an ad that is most relevant to the keyword(s) provided from the tag. If tag provides a keyword that none of the keyword-tagged ads can match, an ad without keyword restriction will be selected instead.

To match all keywords, use a plus sign between two words. To match one of the keywords, use a comma between two words. By default, partial matching applies: water matches both water and watering, watering also matches water. For exact matching, use double quotes "waterless" when entering the target keyword for the ad.

Examples - Matching all target words
Ad "VisitCalifornia" has target keywords travel+california. If the tag has both of these keywords, this ad will be selected for displaying. If the tag has only one or none of the target keywords, this ad will not show. If the keywords from the tag are:
  • travel: will not show
  • california: will not show
  • travel+california: will show
  • travelling+california: will show
  • travel+california+december: will show
Examples - Matching one or more of the target words
Ad "VisitCalifornia" has target keywords travel,california. If the tag has any of these keywords, this ad will be selected for displaying. If the tag has none of the target keywords, this ad will not show. If the keywords from the tag are:
  • travel: will show
  • traveling: will show
  • california: will show
  • travel+california+december: will show
  • florida: will not show

Negative Keywords

Do not show the ad if the tag has these keywords. The usage syntax is similar to the above section. For example, ad "ChildrenVacation" has negative keywords "gambling+violence". If the tag contains both of these negative keywords, this ad will not show. On the other hand, if the ad "ChildrenVacation" has negative keywords "gambling,violence". If the tag contains any of these negative keywords, this ad will not show.

Evaluation Priority

Learn more about the difference between Proactive Targeting vs. Passive Restriction setting.

WordPress and Contextual Ad Serving

For WordPress-powered sites, tags of a post can be extracted as a list and feed to the ad engine via method get_the_tags(). Below is a sample and customizable code snippet to feed the post's tags into the ad serving engine to display a contextual matching ad. You'll need to modify the WordPress template file where the ad should be displayed. "sidebar.php" is a common template file to modify for this purpose.
$keywords = array();
$tags = get_the_tags();
if ($tags) {
 foreach ($tags as $tag) {
  $keywords[] = $tag->name; 
 }
}
$url = 'https://g.adspeed.net/ad.php?do=js&zid=XXXX&oid=YYYY&wd=-1&ht=-1&keywords='.implode('+',$keywords);
echo sprintf('',$url);

Custom Targeting

Using this same keyword targeting feature, you can add to the tag certain non-personal, non-sensitive keywords to match the ad's keyword(s). For example, a membership website could have keyword "visitors" for public ads, keyword "trials" for trial-user ads, and keyword "subscribers" for member-only ads.
Print Was this helpful? Yes / No

Other Articles in Ad Targeting using Restrictions

Learn about ad targeting and restrictions ad serving such as frequency capping, geo-targeting, quota, roadblock, flight date, etc.

Cannot find an answer for your question? Ask our Customer Care team

Related