Contextual Keyword targeting enables you to refine your campaigns by providing keywords or phrases to have greater control over where your ads are displayed. AdRoll’s proprietary natural language processing model informs BidiQ, our bidding engine, to place or exclude ads on webpages where these keywords appear.
By targeting or excluding specific keywords and phrases, ads can be served on relevant websites containing these keywords. This strategy gives you more control over the content your ads appear next to, increased targeting precision, and ensures brand safety.
Keywords do not require an exact match: we use semantic matching to understand which keywords are contained in the websites where impressions are served. Using semantic matching, we can identify that the keyword "car" is semantically similar to "automobile".
Keywords can be added by either typing them in or uploading a .CSV file with up to 100 keywords per Ad Group. When saving campaigns, please note that there is a combined limit of 100 keywords per Ad Group, which includes both targeted and excluded keywords.
Target by Keywords
These are the keywords you explicitly define to identify the types of websites and content where you want your ads to appear. They ensure your ads are shown in relevant contexts that align with your brand message and target audience.
Exclude Keywords
Excluding keywords in your campaigns allows you to restrict your ads from appearing alongside content that is irrelevant or does not align with your brand. This helps protect your brand reputation and prevents wasted ad spend on undesirable placements.
Who can access
Contextual Keyword targeting is available for the following AdRoll ABM packages.
| Your AdRoll ABM Plan | Contextual Keyword Targeting |
|---|---|
| Account Based Advertising | Included |
| Account Based Marketing + Advertising | Included |
| Account Based Marketing | Not included. |
| Starter (Legacy) | Not included |
| Standard (Legacy) | Not included |
| Professional (Legacy) | Included |
| Free | Included |
To find your current package, log in to AdRoll ABM and navigate to Settings > Billing > Plans & Usage.
Campaign Types Supported
Reach Companies in your Account List, leveraging your CRM data and our in-market account insights data, and people in the buying committee (i.e., Engineering Function, VP Seniority, etc) within your Account Lists. You may find this Account Targeting Campaign Guide helpful.
Reach specific contacts within your target accounts. Find more details in the Contact Targeting Campaign Guide.
While Web Retargeting Campaigns primarily focus on re-engaging users who have previously visited your website or mobile app, keyword targeting allows for more granular control over where your retargeting ads are displayed, allowing you to reach an audience that is already familiar with your brand and is more likely to convert. Please read more about how to create a Web Retargeting Campaign.
Limitation
- Contextual Keywords are not available for CTV Campaigns and Playbooks.
Contextual Keyword Supported Languages
Contextual Keywords targeting uses a multilingual model that supports 53 languages.
Automatic Translations from English: When you enter an English keyword (e.g., "fashion"), AdRoll ABM's automatically triggers translations for that keyword in all 53 supported languages. This means your ads will be served on websites containing the word in any of these languages, without you needing to manually input each translation.
This robust language support enables you to effectively connect with diverse linguistic audiences, expanding your campaign's reach and impact.
| Language Code | Language |
|---|---|
| ar | Arabic |
| bg | Bulgarian |
| ca | Catalan |
| cs | Czech |
| da | Danish |
| de | German |
| el | Greek |
| en | English |
| es | Spanish |
| et | Estonian |
| fa | Persian |
| fi | Finnish |
| fr | French |
| fr-ca | French (Canada) |
| gl | Galician |
| gu | Gujarati |
| he | Hebrew |
| hi | Hindi |
| hr | Croatian |
| hu | Hungarian |
| hy | Armenian |
| id | Indonesian |
| it | Italian |
| ja | Japanese |
| ka | Georgian |
| ko | Korean |
| ku | Kurdish |
| lt | Lithuanian |
| lv | Latvian, Lettish |
| mk | Macedonian |
| mn | Mongolian |
| mr | Marathi |
| ms | Malay |
| my | Burmese |
| nb | Norwegian (Bokmål) |
| nl | Dutch |
| pl | Polish |
| pt | Portuguese |
| pt-br | Portuguese (Portugal) |
| ro | Romanian |
| ru | Russian |
| sk | Slovak |
| sl | Slovenian |
| sq | Albanian |
| sr | Serbian |
| sv | Swedish |
| th | Thai |
| tr | Turkish |
| uk | Ukrainian |
| ur | Urdu |
| vi | Vietnamese |
| zh-cn | Chinese (PRC) |
| zh-tw | Chinese (Taiwan) |
Contextual Keyword Best Practices
To maximize the effectiveness of your keyword targeting campaigns, consider the following best practices:
- Research Thoroughly: Conduct comprehensive research to identify keywords that are truly relevant to your product/service and resonate with your target audience.
- Be Specific: While broad keywords can increase reach, highly specific keywords often lead to higher relevance and better performance.
- Find the Right Balance: Using keywords will limit the supply of websites on which ads are able to appear on, which may result in increased CPMs. To maintain the greatest and most cost-efficient reach possible, provide a variety of relevant keywords
- Leverage Keyword Exclusions Diligently: Regularly review and update your list of excluded keywords. While it is paramount to prevent your ads from appearing on irrelevant or inappropriate sites, you also want to be cautious of overblocking and limiting opportunities to reach your target audience.
- Monitor and Optimize: Continuously monitor the performance of your keyword-targeted campaigns. Analyze which keywords and categories are driving the best results and adjust your strategy accordingly. Remove underperforming keywords and explore new ones.
- Ad Group Organization: Organize your keywords into relevant Ad Groups to maintain structure and facilitate easier management and optimization.
Contextual Keyword Use Cases
Contextual Keywords can be used as an additional targeting tactic to refine which contextual environments your ad is shown in.
Example for Keyword Inclusion
A cybersecurity software company is running a campaign to promote its cloud security solution to IT decision-makers at mid-market companies.
Step 1: Choose target audience
The advertiser starts by choosing their target audience. Such as accounts showing high intent for topics like “cloud data protection,” “zero trust architecture,” and “endpoint security”, and /or contacts in those accounts with job titles such as IT Director, VP of Infrastructure, or CIO.
This ensures ads are served to the right companies and roles already signaling research or buying activity in the cybersecurity space.
Step 2: Layer on Contextual Keywords to refine types of website ads will appear
To further refine relevance, the advertiser uses contextual keyword targeting in their display campaign.
The ads will appear within content that includes relevant keywords such as:
- “cloud migration”
- “malware”
- “Cloud firewall”
- “cloud security”
- “IaaS”
- “PaaS”
- “cloud treats”
- “ransomware protection”
This ensures their ads appear in the right context, even if the viewer hasn’t yet triggered intent signals.
Example for Keyword Exclusion (to accomplish similar goals)
A cybersecurity software company is running a campaign to promote its cloud security solution to IT decision-makers at mid-market companies.
Step 1: Choose target audience
The advertiser starts by choosing their target audience — accounts showing high intent for topics like “cloud data protection,” “zero trust architecture,” and “endpoint security,” and/or contacts in those accounts with titles such as IT Director, VP of Infrastructure, or CIO.
This ensures ads are served to the right companies and roles already signaling research or buying activity in the cybersecurity space.
Step 2: Layer on Keyword Exclusions to avoid wasted spend and off-target placements
To further refine relevance and prevent ads from appearing in non-relevant or risky contexts, the advertiser adds keyword exclusions to their display campaign.
The advertiser excludes pages or content that contain unrelated or misleading keywords such as:
- “free antivirus”
- “gaming security”
- “consumer VPN”
- “home Wi-Fi protection”
- “password tips”
- “cybersecurity degree”
- “IT job openings”
By excluding these terms, the campaign avoids showing ads on consumer-oriented, educational, or career-related content that doesn’t align with the company’s B2B buyer intent.
This ensures ad spend focuses only on enterprise-relevant environments where IT decision-makers are actively researching business-grade security solutions improving both efficiency and engagement quality.
Contextual Keyword Reports
AdRoll ABM offers various metrics and reporting capabilities to help you understand the performance of your campaigns and the keywords under them.
Accessing Keyword Performance Data
To view your keyword performance dashboard, follow these steps:
- Navigate to Advertising > Campaigns & Playbooks > Web & Social Campaigns.
- Click on the name of the campaign you wish to check metrics for.
- Scroll down and click Keywords from the tab options (Ads, Categories, Keywords).
To effectively assess your keywords targeted under campaigns, it's important to monitor key performance indicators (KPIs). Here are some of the most widely used metrics:
- Spend: The total cost associated with your ads and emails.
- Impressions: The total number of times your ad was displayed.
- Clicks: The total number of times your ads and emails were clicked.
- CTR (Click-Through Rate): The percentage of ad serves that resulted in a click, calculated as (Clicks / Impressions) * 100.
- CPM (Cost Per Impressions): Your cost for one thousand ad serves, calculated as (Spend / Impressions) * 1000.
- CPC (Cost Per Click): Your average spend for each click, calculated as Spend / Clicks.
- Boolean Conversions: The total number of goal completions, which includes both view-through and click-through conversions.
- ROAS (Return on Advertising Spend): Your profit per dollar spent on ads, calculated as (Click Revenue + View Revenue) / Cost.
- Click Throughs (CTC): A goal completion that occurs after someone clicks your ad.
- View Throughs (VTC): A goal completion that occurs after someone views your ad but does not click.
- Click-Attributed Revenue: The total earnings generated when someone clicks your ad and then converts.
- View-Attributed Revenue: The total earnings generated when someone views your ad and then converts.