BT segments
BT allows marketers to target campaigns based on predefined behavioral segments. Publishers develop target segments based on marketers' requests or most common user activities on their site or network. A sample segment is the travel and leisure segment, which includes users who have shown a need or interest in this area based on their past online research/surfing behavior over a certain period of time.

Each publisher establishes segments based on its own standardized parameters. Variables within the parameters of the segments usually include monitoring the time applied to a user's behavior to determine if they can categorize in the segment; the depth of the level of activity in a particular segment category, such as how many content pieces were viewed around a particular topic, and the types of activities used to create a behavioral category.

There are two types of behavioral categories:

• Singular channel (e.g., website content, URL)
  • A publisher only uses a single channel of user activity to group users into a behavioral segment. Example: only monitor users based on what content they read. Content is being categorized through screening of keyword density.
• Multiple channels (e.g., search, email)
  • A more comprehensive form of user categorization is done when a publisher uses multiple channels of behavior. In this case, a publisher uses such aspects as search activity, clicks on ads, videos watched and content. It is obvious that this form of categorizing a user is much more in-depth and leads to better targeting opportunities for the advertiser.

Publisher differences in BT setup
There is also a difference in where publishers gather the data about a user through cookie placements. The two forms of data-gathering methods that are available -- as I prefer to call them -- are proprietary and open network methods.

In the proprietary network environment, publishers -- both portals and ad networks -- only use data that was generated when users conduct their behavior while they are actually on that publisher's specific properties.

In an open network environment, a publisher places a cookie that tracks all activities of the users across the entire internet. The important point here, however, is that the publisher still only serves the ads when the user is back on the publisher's property.