With keyword targeting, you can target campaigns to specific pages or sections of your website. Additionally, you can target keywords to behave in a few different ways.
Setup of Keywords
Site-Side Setup (Your Website)
First, you need keywords embedded into your website’s pages. If you did not use this method and you use WordPress, head down to the plugin method section.
If you manually dropped Broadstreet’s zone code onto your website, you will need to change the ad tags to use the keyword parameter.
When setting your site up with Broadstreet, there was a script that made a call to broadstreet.watch(). That call takes a keywords option. If you wanted to pass “keyword1” and “keyword2” to the adserver, you would modify your call to broadstreet.watch to:
<script>broadstreet.watch({ keywords: ['keyword1', 'keyword2'] });</script>
That will pass the specified keywords to the adserver for all zones. You can also set keywords on a per-zone basis. For example, if your ad code originally said: <broadstreet-zone zone-id=”1234″></broadstreet-zone>
You might want to rewrite it to say:
<broadstreet-zone zone-id="1234" keywords="keyword1,keyword2"></broadstreet-zone>
In that example, we’re again passing two keywords to the adserver: keyword1, and keyword2. You can ask your website’s developer to inject whichever keywords you would like into the page dynamically. There are other options you can specify too:
uriKeywords: true
If you use this option, you are asking Broadstreet to use segments from the current page URL as keywords. On a page such as example.com/category/page-title, an ad tag that says:
<broadstreet-zone zone-id="1234" uri-keywords="true"></broadstreet-zone>
This will essentially become:
broadstreet.zone(1234, {keywords: ['category', 'page-title']});
softKeywords: true
By default, keywords are “hard”, meaning that the ad slot is requesting only ads that match one of those keywords (a logical OR). If you specify soft Keywords, you are reporting the keywords to the adserver, but any campaign targeted to that zone is a valid campaign. This can be useful for reasons we’ll soon discuss.
Plugin Method
If you have WordPress you can use the Broadstreet plugin.
Once the plugin is setup, there is a “Broadstreet Ad Zone” widget which will be available on the WordPress widgets page. Drag this widget to your sidebar, select the zone you would like to display, and save.
This widget will automatically use the softKeywords option described above, and drop the category slugs and page slug pertaining to the page or post. So if you have a category named “Schools”, the page slug is likely “schools”, which you can confirm on the Posts -> Categories page. You can use the “schools” slug/keyword to target any posts in the category schools, which I’ll describe in the next section.
The WordPress widget will additionally drop in some extra keywords with may be helpful:
- is_home_page: Only dropped on the front page
- not_home_page: Dropped everywhere but the homepage
- is_landing_page: Dropped on any category/archive page
- not_landing_page: Dropped everywhere but category/archive pages
- is_article_page: Dropped on any article/single post
- not_article_page: Dropped on any but article/single posts
You will a see an empty box where you can enter a comma-separated list of keywords. The keywords will be evaluated on a logical OR basis. That means a keyword match takes place when a zone has has any one of the keywords that a campaign matches.
Once you’re finished, you have the option to check off keyword exclusivity, which means that the campaign will only run in zones that have one of those keywords.
Let’s go over the different possibilities with keyword exclusivity and the softKeywords option:
softKeywords: false (default) and Keyword Exclusivity Off
This means a campaign will run in zones that have no specified keywords or matching keywords. It will not run in zones that have keywords but no matching keywords. The zones themselves will only accept campaigns with the keywords specified in its configuration.
softKeywords: false (default) and Keyword Exclusivity On
The most restrictive option. This means a campaign will only run in zones with matching keywords. Zones will only show campaigns with matching keywords.
softKeywords: true and Keyword Exclusivity Off
This is the least restrictive option. The campaign will appear zones with matching keywords, or in zones that do not specify any keywords whatsoever. It will not appear in zones that specify different keywords. Zones, however, will display any campaigns targeted to them whether they have keywords or not.
softKeywords: true and Keyword Exclusivity On (very common use case)
This means the campaign will only show in zones with one of those keywords. The zone itself will show any campaign that is targeted to it. This might be handy if you ever want a “run of site” campaign, in which case you would leave keyword.
It doesn’t work the way I imagined!
There are a lot of different ways this could work, and we did our best to involve the most common use cases without complicating the process (which is already quite sophisticated!). If keywords don’t work as planned, we encourage you consider adjusting your approach to match ours :).