Training the Next Generation of IT Engineers
Kontera
Kontera also uses JavaScript to add advertising to your page, but you have no control over where the ads go except to include or exclude certain areas of your page. The Kontera JavaScript creates (in my opinion ‘ugly’) double-underlined hyperlinked text in your page that trigger a (again, my opinion ‘annoying’) pop-up ads when the mouse passes over the link. The visitor doesn’t even have to click to get the popup, just move the mouse over it on the way to click something else. Kontera pop-up ads obscure the content you worked so hard to produce. If you have seen links with double underlines in a web page, odds are good that the site uses Kontera for advertising.
Context, Baby!
Kontera Fails the Contextual Test
The article in the screenshot was taken from another website. The article was written to describe the importance of bathroom cieling vent fans and how they remove excess moisture from the bathroom. Google, quite appropriately displays an ad for a dehumidifier. Kontera utterly fails to understand this is an article about fans or moisture and consistently displays ads for either Dodge trucks or Dell servers. Strike One. Kontera selects ‘ceiling’ as a linkable word. Kontera fails to understand that the word ‘ceiling’ is not the word ‘truck’ or ‘computer’. Strike Two. This disconnect between the ads and the words linked was consistent across every site I found Kontera ad-links. If you are looking for a quick and easy solution to generate revenue at your site, go with Google AdSense and just skip Kontera.
Finally, the AdSense Ads on my own site had pulled in more than $100 in those two months and Kontera, less than $3.00–and my site actually HAS tutorials on computer and servers, so even a few of my pages should have been consistent with the ads and STILL I made next to nothing on the Kontera ads.
Kontera Drove Away Visitors
I witnessed an 8% drop in traffic after adding the Kontera ads to my website and that traffic levels STILL haven’t recovered. Since the addition of the Kontera ads was the only change in the website and previous years and month performance gives no indicators for this drop, I can only conclude that my visitors were turned off by the Kontera ads. Just how well Google’s contextualization works and how badly Kontera’s does is shown here in this screenshot grabbed off an actual website. Good contextualization means the ad placement will be appropriate to the content it is placed next to. Because the visitor came to the site looking for similar information, the idea is that the user is more likely to click the ad because it is just like the content in the page from a context standpoint.