• by Tameka Kee , February 12, 2008

If you develop a finely tuned behavioral targeting campaign but choose a publisher that's too niche, offers audience segments that are too generic, or won't work with you to optimize creative, then you're wasting your client's dollars, according to panelists at the OMMA Behavioral conference on Monday.

"A behaviorally targeted campaign is only as good as the sites it runs on and the information that the publishers provide," said Jonathan Mendez, former founder and Chief Strategy Officer of OTTO Digital.

Mendez and executives from properties like TVGuide Online and Care2 agreed that the most successful behavioral targeting campaigns require strategy, tools and effort from both the advertiser and the publisher--and they shed light on some of the solutions that worthwhile publishers in the space can provide.

First, there are multiple options for slicing up the audience--so if a publisher offers just one, then you may need to look elsewhere.

"We look at how our users are navigating and break them into segments according to what they're on the site for," said Kirsten Rasanen, director of product development at TVGuide Online. "Are they there for TV listings or reading articles? Are they information gatherers, entertainment seekers, or just digital enthusiasts? We also have a natural product for advertisers with genre-targeting, so if they want athletes, or a sci-fi package, we can pitch it to them."

At Care2, an environmental and social activism-oriented site, they offer audience segments in terms of levels of involvement (user actions like commenting on articles, sharing recipes or participating in forum discussions), as well as the specific content that they were passionate about or "acted" on.

Publishers can also increase the value of their behavioral inventory by having the right kinds of segmenting technology, either by partnering with a provider like Revenue Science or Tacoda, or developing their own in-house, as in the case of Care2.

Along with tools and targeting options, advertisers should look for publishers that can help craft strategies for things like message testing. "We do split a/b testing--so an advertiser can run different ads based on how long users spend time on the site and things like number of page views," said Joe Baker, Care2's senior director of nonprofit campaigns.

Panelists also said that advertisers should be willing to trust publishers when they suggest campaign improvements or alternative audience segments. "It's difficult to get advertisers and agencies to build multiple kinds of creative," said Robert Tas, founder of Sportgenic, a site that caters to sports enthusiasts. "And we're always testing audience segments, so we come up with segments that they haven't thought of."

Lastly, think beyond the click when it comes to the value of behaviorally targeted ads. "We're so bottom-of-the-funnel focused. It's all about the conversion and did I sell them. You can't devalue the impression in favor of the click," Tas said. "We're starting to see some advertisers use behavioral to drive metrics like purchase intent and brand impact--but we definitely need more research."

Tas added that this was especially true for big-ticket items like cars. "If I serve someone a car ad, they're not going to buy the car from the banner, or maybe not even the dealer's Web site," he said. "But there's still impact. There's something to be said for reaching a person in our environment or at a passion point."

According to Andrew Monfried, founder and CEO of LOTAME, an online marketing firm that helps social networks monetize their inventory, the all-important click-through rate (CTR) is the gift and the curse of popular Web properties.

"The commonality of media is that CTRs are abysmal in the most-trafficked areas. The higher the level of user engagement, the less attention they're going to pay to the ads," Monfried said. "But oftentimes the lower the CTRs, the higher the conversion on the back end." Monfried added that those factors made things like post-click and post-impression data all the more important for behavioral targeting success.