Revenue Science's account director shares five tips for building better audience segments.

A note from Editor in Chief & Chief Content Officer Brad Berens: It's worth pointing out that at the time of publication Revenue Science is sponsoring our Behavioral Marketing coverage, but Jeremy's byline is in no way a part of that sponsorship. You can find a more detailed explanation of our editorial policy here or contact me directly with questions.

I recently wrote about four key areas of focus for publishers while they are creating behavioral targeting segments. Segment creation is an equally valid topic for agencies, but agencies experience a different set of challenges. Naturally, publishers know their own site metrics and available options for potential audiences, but agencies are the experts on the target composition and might even have better insight into what would create the perfect audience. Additionally, agencies need to trust publishers to create segments with the best balance of relevance and reach. So here are a few tips for agencies on how to ensure publishers can build you the best audience segments.

1. Provide an abundance of information
Often an agency will send a behavioral targeting brief with minimal information about the target audience. When creating target segments, publishers like to know certain basics like communication objectives, target composition, creative messaging, campaign objectives, and the clickthrough URL. This is certainly not the limit of what they want to know, and I have rarely seen a good publisher bemoan too much information about the target audience on the RFP. Publishers can then use their behavioral targeting tool to research and find the best audiences, and I usually find that the best segments come from the RFPs with the richest information.

Recently I had a situation where a publisher defined Engaged Auto Shoppers as "all users with multiple page views in their car review section over the last 8 weeks" because the RFP was not specific about the nuances of the audience composition. After seeing this segment definition, the agency told the publisher their particular auto brand has an online research period of no more than four weeks. Once they shared that information, the publisher was happy to revise the length of the segment definition to increase the qualified audience in the segment.

2. Be open to publisher suggestions but stick to your guns
As I mentioned in my last article, it is rare for an audience segment to be perfect at first pass, so communicating about iteration is very important. For example, a few months ago a UK software company sent an RFP for a segment of users who read articles including the words "firewalls," "spam" and "virus protection." Some of our publishers researched their data and realized that other words like "data security" or "spyware" could be just as important (or even better) for finding the right audience and suggested those words also be included. It is always encouraging to see agencies and publishers working collaboratively like this to find the most qualified audiences.

At the same time, much of the trade-off between segment size and quality is determined by how many page views qualify an audience as being engaged with a topic. If a user has two page views of sports content over the last 12 weeks, they can't realistically be considered a sports fanatic. But if that same user looked at a specific stock quote twice over 12 weeks, they could be termed an engaged investor because users usually consume less financial content than sports content. If you have a pre-conceived notion of what constitutes a good segment definition, then definitely share it with the publisher, but be open to their rationale as to why a different definition is valid. And, if you think they have a segment defined too loosely, share your concerns and ask them to justify the definition. The best publishers will always have a good rationale and they want you and your client to have confidence in the segment.

3. Request detailed segment definitions
Hopefully your publishers use a behavioral targeting tool with clearly defined segment rules that they can easily share with you. For instance, many Revenue Science publishers use our "Search by Content" feature to create segments of users who read articles with targeted keywords. Publishers can simply press an export button to get an Excel output of these past articles so the agency can confirm they are in line with who they want in the target audience. Whenever I meet with an agency, I suggest they request a list like this. Other scenarios where an agency should request detailed definitions include the specific categories or sections the audience needed to visit to qualify, specific IP address characteristics (domains, industry names, Fortune rankings, etc), or the number of times a person needs to see certain content before they are considered "engaged" (see point 2 above). We also recommend the Insertion Order contain the official segment name and ID for audit purposes. Good publishers always support these open communication practices to foster excellent relationships.

4. Share the results
Every good publisher craves insight into the back-end metrics of campaign success. And when an agency shares these metrics, it always produces better understanding and agreement. This is especially important in behavioral targeting, where much of the campaign success is measured on how the segment composition indexes against the target. So please share your research so everyone can learn which segment definitions work the best for future continued success.

Research is also a critical component of this and we always support research surveys with companies like Dynamic Logic or Insight Express to measure audience composition, message recall, brand association, etc.

5. Ask, Ask, Ask
One last note: do not hesitate to reach out to the behavioral targeting company directly for addition insight into how their specific segment creation technology works and what sets it apart from other behavioral targeting tools in the marketplace. Ask for a demo of what publishers use to create segments, how the tools work and why the segments are high quality.

I hope these suggestions are helpful with how you engage with the publishers and/or the behavioral targeting provider when creating and running behavioral targeting campaigns. Please contact me with any of your own tips for how to create the best behavioral segments.

Jeremy Mason is an account director for Revenue Science, Inc. Read full bio.