Reach and conversion requirements
When conducting a behavioral campaign, your audience reach is likely to be significantly lower than if you were to conduct a demographically targeted campaign. In theory, however, this smaller audience is significantly more likely to convert.

In order to determine if you should conduct a behavioral campaign rather than a demographical campaign in the first place, look at the premium that an advertiser pays for the behavioral campaign over a demographics campaign. My agency works with our clients to establish the required success lift needed from the campaign and runs a small test campaign to see if the increased conversion rate is sufficient.

Also be sure to establish if there is an opportunity to integrate demographical data into your BT campaign; some publishers are unable to cross-reference the campaigns between demographics and behavior, so it is worthwhile for you to ask.

Demographics -- such as audience age, household income and geographic location -- obviously refine your campaign and make it potentially too narrow, so you should identify if it might make sense only to apply certain demographical filters to your audience in order to have an effective reach.

Future requests
BT is here to stay, and I predict it will increase in adoption over the next few years. However, in order to have advertisers take full advantage of it, I would like to make some requests to our behavioral community.

In order to properly and better target our audiences, we need to obtain as much information about them as we can. Publishers need to practice greater transparency with marketers to help identify where else users are going in order to take advantage of other opportunities.

In addition to just seeing how well a behaviorally targeted placement performs, deeper insights, which can help to better define who exactly that target is, would be extremely valuable to see for current and future marketing efforts. Getting more granular and seeing what site segments our online ads are performing best on, in addition to simply seeing how well "Behavioral Placement X" did, would also be very helpful. Taking a full-circle approach to reporting campaign performance, from marketer to agency to publisher, is beneficial for all in terms of growing the business.

Additionally, there needs to be a standardized definition of what comprises a behavioral segment. Every publisher defines their segments differently; one publisher may categorize a user based on one click or one purchase, whereas another may gauge the frequency and duration of the user behavior to categorize them for a particular segment.

By creating a standard of what constitutes a behavioral segment, the consistency among publishers will be more universal. With these advancements, the future of behavioral targeting will have room for improvement and increased opportunities.