• by Laurie Sullivan , Staff Writer @lauriesullivan, November 12, 2009

TARGUSinfo on Tuesday reported a partnership with optimization platform provider AdMeld designed to better target consumers with ads across the Internet.

Broadening the definition of "behavioral targeting" might draw a straight line from BT to "dynamically optimized ad tags," but TARGUSinfo insists it doesn't offer BT in the traditional sense of the words.

AdMeld, however, will offer TARGUSinfo AdAdvisor what it calls "verified audience groups" to increase revenue from remnant ad inventory, a market segment that research firm Think Equity identified as reaching a $11.5 billion opportunity by 2014. AdMeld customers already include Discovery Communications, FOX News, IAC, Thomson Reuters, World Wrestling Entertainment, and more than 125 others worldwide.

A key reason TARGUSinfo created AdAdvisor was to bring predictive offline data to ad technology platforms like AdMeld.

AdMeld's technology taps into real-time bidding and optimizes ad tags on the fly to select the best mix of ads across hundreds of ad networks and exchanges.

Soon, however, you won't need to buy that audience. Search engines from Google to LeapFish that offer personalized searches will pull from information in users' profiles and combine it with data collected from cookies. The engines will combine data from social signals, such as search history, Web page visits, query revisions, analysis, interaction with advertisers, and the time of day people search on a topic.

Dave Harry, Reliable SEO founder, says behavioral targeting will first see the rise within the pay-per-click and ad serving platforms, followed by social Web graph applications, such as Google Open Social. "For the immediate future, the social signals will continue to be but a small player in the search algorithms," he says. "It may sound counterintuitive, until one actually thinks it through from an algorithmic and economic benefit point of view."