Experience a more intuitive Contextual Marketplace

What it is 

Contextual targeting helps traders align their ads and campaign goals with the content audiences are engaging with, making it easier to reach new, relevant audiences. By incorporating contextual signals alongside your audience targeting strategies, you can improve relevance, increase control, and help scale audience-first campaigns more effectively. 

The Contextual Marketplace, available within the Contextual (X) tile, enables you to target or block contextual segments based on specific topics. These segments are powered by third-party contextual data partners and The Trade Desk’s in-house offerings. Recent upgrades to the Contextual Marketplace introduce a more streamlined workflow — making it easier to build and manage smarter contextual strategies. 

What’s new 

These enhancements are designed to give advertisers greater control and transparency when applying contextual strategies across campaigns: 

• Enhanced bidding logic: Group segments from multiple providers using new “and/​or” logic. You are no longer limited to selecting segments from a single provider. 

• Better insights and new metadata: The new Contextual Performance report provides impression-level and performance data for each individual contextual segment applied to your ad groups. Additional insights directly in the UI, like average daily reach, can help forecast reach and optimize targeting, along with existing metrics like scale and relevance. 

• Contextual Library: Keep all your strategies in one place with the Contextual Library. Easily edit, reuse, and apply saved data groups and strategies across multiple ad groups. 

• Expanding AI partnerships: Evertune recently announced it would be expanding its AI retargeting capabilities via The Trade Desk platform. This expansion highlights the growing role of AI and contextual signals in helping you reach high-intent audiences more effectively across relevant premium publisher environments. This capability is expected to be available in early Q2.

How to get access 

Advertisers can opt in to the new Contextual Marketplace experience through the banner that appears when you click the Contextual (X) tile. 

To learn more about contextual targeting and the Contextual Marketplace, visit the Knowledge Portal (requires a platform login). For additional support, please contact your representative at The Trade Desk.

This information is provided solely for background and is not a representation or guarantee of any future performance.