If you missed the early stages of behavioral targeting (BT), you also missed all the BT 101 materials that appeared back then. Now that BT pundits almost always address their remarks to the educated, catching up can be hard.

For all you folks out there who are new to BT but need to know more, this is a 5 step plan for starting your first BT campaign.

Once upon a time...
Imagine that you're planning an online campaign for the "Eversink," a fancy new putter.

Your client, the seller of this prodigious golf club, is cash-poor and needs to do the job as economically as possible.

If funds were unlimited you might concentrate the campaign on a selection of premium golf-related websites. But the contextual audience that they offer is pricey, and your client's campaign would be a short one if that was all you did.

In the bad old days the only solution would have been to dilute your effort with lower quality inventory, which would lengthen its run but would likely not improve its ROI.

But these days there's another choice-- behavioral targeting which aims to provide you with the same audience that you would find on top-priced verticals, but for less.

How?