Types of contextual ads

Overview

Growl delivers contextual ads that blend into the native environment. There are two types of contextual ads for AI chatbot companies:

Product Integration Ads

Non-intrusive ads that blend into your product, such as badge ads or contextual calls-to-action. These appear outside of the chat window, for example as a badge below a character’s name.

• No chat data required
• Strictly contextual: uses only page or product info
• Great for companion AI
• Easy to integrate

Chat Ads

Ads that display as part of the chat flow itself. These include native in-chat offers matched to conversation context.

• Optionally uses chat data for precise targeting
• Highly relevant to user intent
• May require additional consent per your privacy policy
• Ideal for assistant-style AI, companions, support bots, etc.

Quickstart

To embed Growl ads in your product, follow these steps:

1. Understand how ads can affect retention.
2. Learn to A/B test user engagement using Growl’s built-in tools to determine the impact of ads and identify your best ad slots.
3. Follow the JavaScript integration guide to place ads in your product and start earning revenue.

Jargon for Ads

Before you can begin serving ads, you also need to know how to speak “ads”. Here are some common terms that are referenced in later guides.

Ad Slot

This is the unique position in your online property (app or website) where an ad appears.

For instance, if you decide to put an ad in the character card on a particular URL of your page, that ‘ad’ should be given a unique ad slot.

Ad slot placed inside a companion card on the page. Ad slots in different companion cards should have different IDs.

Please allocate a unique ad-slot to every Growl ad slot on your page by using the attribute data-growl-slot on the data-growl-ad elements.

Ad Creative

Ad creative is the element containing the actual advertisement that the user is exposed to. This could be an image, text, interactive element or anything else that can be reasonably rendered in a UI.

Growl only serves contextually relevant ad creatives which means that they are relevant to the surrounding context. Learn more about contextual ads here.

Ad Unit

An Ad Unit is a specific ad placement on your site or app, identified by a unique ID. It defines the type of ad and its basic properties (such as size and style).

It can further be used to set other attributes of the ad like ad frequency, targeting and more (coming soon).

Ad Key

Ad Key is a unique key that helps persist an ad creative for a pre-defined set of time. This is an optional attribute that can be passed in using data-growl-key attribute on the Ad container element.

Caution

Ad Key must be used sparingly and only in appropriate settings. Most users should leave it blank if their use-case does not fit require the ad creative to be the same across ad slots. Ad key ensures that a creative across ad slots is the same.

Example: For a companion character, a badge ad (see here) should be the same for all ad slots associated with that companion. If the ad says ”🎶 Listening to <song name>”, then this should be repeated across instances. To achieve that, use the same ad key across all these slots.