Return To The Behavioral Bandwagon

With the economy in trouble and interactive marketers working hard to justify their budgets, online ad targeting can provide a vital boost in campaign performance. Spurred on by new offerings from Google and other vendors, marketers' use of online ad targeting has grown significantly in recent years. Behavioral targeting adoption in particular has skyrocketed — it was used by just 10% of the European advertisers we surveyed in 2007, but grew to be used by 26% of those surveyed in 2008. However, many advertisers limit their targeting criteria to overly simplistic behaviors or focus their behavioral segments on idealized audience characteristics. To make behavioral targeting more effective, interactive marketers must better research which segments provide the greatest lift in campaign performance and be willing to target quirky but effective segmentations.