Updated April 2020
In-text advertising is a form of digital advertising that replaces words on a website with links paid for by advertisers.
An advertiser bids for keywords and provides a destination URL. These keywords are replaced with links using a Javascript snippet on the publishers website.
In 2020 the leading in-text advertising networks are:
- Skimlinks – https://skimlinks.com
- Infolinks – https://www.infolinks.com
- Viglink – https://www.viglink.com
- Vibrant – https://www.vibrantmedia.com
How to create your own internal in-text links
If you wanted to change every mention of the word kindle on your site to an amazon affiliate link for example you could use something like the following code. Copy and paste this into a intext.js file and then include this javascript file on every page that you want to modify. Alternatively you can put the code below between script tags and directly insert it into the HTML.
const inTextLinks = () => {
const links = {
'kindle': 'https://amazon.com',
'James': 'https://jamesbachini.com',
};
Object.keys(links).forEach((kw) => {
document.body.innerHTML = document.body.innerHTML.split(kw).join('<a href="'+links[kw]+'" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">'+kw+'</a>');
});
}
inTextLinks()Advertising Tips For In-Text Ads
- Go for high volume keywords or keyword lists as there isn’t huge volume on any of the networks you can’t niche down too much.
- Don’t expect any SEO value as the links are post load injected using Javascript and normally contain no-follow references.
- Monitor source and keyword performance metrics carefully and optimise regularly
- Scale out profitable campaigns with keyword lists related to your topic
- In-text links work great with products and broad affiliate programs like Amazon Associates and eBay where there is no limit to the number of products and keywords you can target.
Earnings and Costs
eCPM and CPM rates are in the range of $1-5 USD / 1000 impressions. Average US blog traffic with a mix of mobile and desktop would earn approximately $3 eCPM and advertisers should expect to pay slightly more to cover the ad networks mark up.
Sites with more text content will have more keywords to bid on and will naturally earn higher CPM rates.
——— Original Blog Post ———–
In-text advertising is a form of contextual advertising which is normally served on a cost per click basis. Targeted keywords are turned into links which drive traffic to your offers and landing pages. See below for an example:
Alot of these type of ads are served on blogs and content sites so the quality of traffic can be quite high due to nature of visitors coming indirectly from the search engines.
Keywords, Keywords, Keywords
Just like PPC you’re campaigns are going to made or broken on your keyword lists. Target keywords based on what kind of sites they might appear on. An example of when in-text advertising can be really effective is when you are selling or affiliated with a company marketing a particular model or product.
i.e. Honda Cars Test Drive Offer
The keyword Civic for example is so specific to Honda your traffic quality is going to be really high.
Another layer of targeting and optimisation
Unlike with Adwords or MSN Adcenter you can actually target by site. So once you have some data to work with you can run off a conversion report and see which sites are working and which are blowing money to the wind, optimise accordingly for increased ROI.
Here are some in-text advertising companies to get started with:
- Infolinks
- Kontera
- TrafficVance – Technically a PPV channel but also do in-text.
- Adside
- Inlinks
