Jumpstart Automotive's director of strategy development demonstrates how behavioral targeting can produce two new revenue sources for publishers.

A good deal has been written about the benefits to advertisers of using behavioral targeting to serve ads that match user interests with the simple promise made -- and kept -- that the more relevant the ad message, the higher the response rate. Today, let's take a look at how publishers and OEM sites benefit from BT, especially when they are the "origination" for in-market behaviors.

It is a well-known fact that automakers buy as much contextual advertising space as they can find on third-party auto research sites and auto-branded sites, so that they ensure a strong audience of potential buyers. While that is good news for the sites on the media plan, selling out nearly all of its contextual space does not fully monetize the true value of the site's audience. That's where BT can provide incremental value-- and income.

Note that I said that auto sites sell nearly all of their contextual space. But like terrestrial real estate is all about location, location, location, so is virtual real estate. No site sells out all ad availability, simply because some inventory has a higher perceived value than other inventory. BT can drop a cookie on visitors to the "high value" contextual pages, but wait and serve them ads when they visit the less valuable parts of the site. Because of the "surprise" factor and the relevancy of the BT ads, users click on out-of-context ads at a higher rate than run-of-site ads. This is good news for the advertiser. And it's also good news for the publisher who gets to monetize the lower value inventory with BT-served ads.

Another value BT brings to publishers is the possibility of being rewarded when they are the "origination" for in-market behaviors. This is a process where auto publishers, including the OEM sites, tag appropriate pages within their sites so that visitors to those pages get a cookie identifying them as probable in-market buyers. Over a short period of time, a sizeable audience of unique users can be placed into an audience segment that can be sold to auto marketers. Publishers or ad networks can then target these users when they come back online elsewhere.

This process is called retargeting and to be effective requires the ability to serve ads across a sizeable number of sites. Jumpstart's Behavioral Auto Channel, for example, includes retargeting partnerships with ValueClick Media, Burst Media, Collective Media, BlueLithium, Comcast.net, FoxNews.com and TVGuide.com. Each site or network provides inventory to Jumpstart to behaviorally retarget users who have visited the Jumpstart Network of origination partners, such as NADAguides, Vehix, Consumer Guide Automotive, J.D. Power Autos. These origination publishers sort millions of auto shoppers per month by their navigation behaviors, indicating that they are active auto shoppers. Publishers get paid a percentage of gross CPM for all campaigns that are run against users who originated on their sites.

The BT bottom line for publisher is that they can make incremental revenue by serving ads into "low value" inventory and by contributing users who originate on their sites to audience segments that will be used for retargeting. Seems like a win-win for smart publishers.

Choon Choi is director of strategy and partner development at Jumpstart Automotive Media. Read full bio.