Advanced analytics hold new promise for optimizing the latest wave of targeting and delivery innovations for your brand. Exponential Inc.'s CEO explains.

Behavioral targeting is this season's new black. Not a day goes by when there is not at least one article on the subject of behavioral targeting, and TACODA's recent acquisition by AOL was another big step in legitimizing this approach to targeting users online.

Regardless of all the hype, behavioral is proving itself as an approach that can work consistently for advertisers. Yet, some advertisers have had frustrating experiences, and others are simply overwhelmed by the complexity of the different vendor offerings.

At the heart of the discussion about behavioral targeting is the very promise of online marketing: the ability to target a user in the most receptive moment with a marketing message. Yet the discussion about behavioral reduces the online marketing equation to one dimension: purchase and interest behaviors. While these are powerful indicators, they are just a part of the equation, and they leave aside several important considerations.

We are entering an unprecedented period in our evolution as an industry. Marketers can now target their online advertising with greater precision than with any other medium. Specifically, advertisers can target people online anonymously based on the type, recency and frequency of content they consume; by demographics and psychographics of their audience; by interest data submitted to a website, even by offline purchase behavior and a host of other variables.

Here is a real example of how an employment advertiser can make combined use of these innovations in targeting and delivery. Let's say this national advertiser wants to leverage the new engineering job listings that are coming into its database all the time and target them to the best possible candidates. Behavioral and predictive technologies can identify -- from job site URLs, search terms and areas on sites where a user might be spending time -- users that are searching for a new technology job. Semantic analysis of websites can offer specific page topics to target, for example, "Java" or "Visual Basic" programming languages. IP addresses and publisher-provided, anonymous user data give additional opportunities to select only relevant job offers for a user in a particular geography. Wrapping all these elements together, an advertiser could then use a customizable ad unit to dynamically deliver highly targeted job listings directly from its database to a qualified candidate, in a relevant environment.

At the end of the day, advertisers do not care about how one technology provider characterizes one audience segment vs. another. Indeed, advertisers are frustrated by the needless complexity of different names and segments and by conversations about data; all they want is for their campaigns to succeed in delivering their objectives, be it specific performance or a shift in attitudinal brand metrics.

Advanced analytics can provide important insights into which audiences are responding to an advertiser's message, be it specific performance or a shift in attitudinal brand metrics. These insights can then be used to refine the message as well as improve the targeting of offline media. Advanced optimization can automatically shift inventory to the areas online that respond to an advertiser's offering. Instead of advertisers paying to test out clusters, optimization technology automatically finds the clusters that work.

Finally, ad unit innovations allow for the realization of one-to-one marketing by making it easy to customize the message for every audience cluster. With a simple database and template-driven creative, advertisers can display potentially thousands of different creative campaigns corresponding to different audience clusters.

Since the dark days of the dotcom bust, we have come a long way towards building a better solution for both advertisers and publishers, and we are seeing the fruits or our labor. Advertisers now have high quality, safe and transparent places to advertise online, and can apply the many different types of information they know about their audience to target their campaigns. The real value add in online targeting comes from combining many different attributes so that an advertiser gets a more precisely targeted campaign, with substantial reach and with less waste.

Dilip DaSilva is president and CEO of Exponential, Inc. Read full bio.