Verve Group’s contextual targeting outperforms industry leaders in test

Advertisers and agencies want contextual targeting to deliver perfectly aligned ads on the freshest content. But most content has a short shelf life, becoming "old news" before it's even indexed. New research from TPA Digital compared three leading contextual solutions (including our own Moments. AI™) by measuring content relevance and recency. The takeaway? Marketers should set a higher bar for accuracy and freshness in their contextual campaigns.

Background

Behavioural-based advertising is at risk due to the decline of cookies. As marketers seek privacy-compliant ways to run effective programmatic ad campaigns, contextual targeting is making a comeback. Contextual targeting involves matching relevant online content with a brand’s desired audience. However, implementing contextual targeting requires crawling and classifying new web pages, a process that usually takes over 24 hours. Most new internet content consists of news articles, which have an unfortunately short lifespan. Around 74% of new articles experience peak traffic on their publication day, and an additional 25% peak the day after. This raises an important question: how can brands effectively use contextual targeting to access new and relevant content at the peak of audience consumption?

Study

Verve Group approached TPA Digital with a solution to this problem. Claiming that Moments.AI™ technology can contextually target content on the open web on the same day it’s published. This capability could allow advertisers to showcase their ads alongside highly relevant new content, capitalizing on its significant audience.

To verify Verve Group’s Moments.AI™ contextual ad targeting capability, TPA Digital conducted an independent test comparing it with two leading providers. The test involved a 24-hour campaign targeting fresh sports-related content in the UK and Germany. It measured the proportion of impressions displayed on sports-related URLs and the percentage of impressions delivered on URLs published on the same day.

Results

Using Moments.AI™, TPA Labs discovered an impressive 96% of impressions being effectively delivered on URLs published on the very same day of the campaign. This strongly outperformed the alternative vendor segments, meaning TPA Labs can independently verify Verve Group’s initial claims. 

The analysis also revealed concerning data about the efficacy of contextual targeting from the alternative vendors. Moments.AI™ delivered 85.9% of impressions on sports-related URLs, while only 4.6% and 4.3% of impressions delivered by the two other vendors appeared alongside articles classified as sports content. 

When analyzing these metrics together (% of impressions served on sports-related URLs and % of URLs published on the same day), Verve Group outperformed the leading market alternatives by 36x.

You can find the full report here.