May 14, 2009 at 3:01 Is contextual advertising falling?
Hitwise notes a decrease in the share of contextual traffic in the total share of search traffic coming to sites. If last spring contextual advertising made up an average of 9.84% of search traffic to sites, now only 7.25% remains. The trend appears on 16 of the 17 thematic categories of sites (except for "Education", where the share of context has grown from 1.39% to 1.45%), that is, almost everywhere.
The nature of the phenomenon is not entirely clear. Most likely, we are seeing a gradual flow of SEO budgets from contextual advertising to optimizers that work with organic search results. Perhaps there is an improvement in the quality of search results, because of which people are less distracted by contextual advertising. Or simply contextual links to Google were so "fed up" that they simply began to pay less attention.
Hitwise analysts themselves explain the recession and lower advertising costs, but their logic is not entirely clear.
The nature of the phenomenon is not entirely clear. Most likely, we are seeing a gradual flow of SEO budgets from contextual advertising to optimizers that work with organic search results. Perhaps there is an improvement in the quality of search results, because of which people are less distracted by contextual advertising. Or simply contextual links to Google were so "fed up" that they simply began to pay less attention.
Hitwise analysts themselves explain the recession and lower advertising costs, but their logic is not entirely clear.