The simple answer is that all advertisers can take advantage of Behavioral Targeting.

Whether you are a brand awareness focused, large Brand Advertiser or a performance focused, Direct Response advertiser, Behavioral Targeting can help you achieve your goals while improving the efficiency of your advertising dollars.

Brand advertisers use behavioral targeting to deliver their advertisements to consumers who are in-market for their product or service. If you know someone is researching information about your products or services online, you can target that user specifically and deliver relevant messages to them over time.

Someone who is showing online behaviors that classify them as ‘in-market’ for your product or service is much more likely to purchase your product or service than someone who has never shown such behaviors. If you know the behavioral characteristics of your best customers, you can craft messages that will attract new customers who happen to have those same traits.   

One of the biggest weak spots of behavioral targeting for brand advertisers is the ability to scale their media spend once they have tested and found success.  To overcome this challenge, brand advertisers have turned to behavioral ad networks to deliver their message to the critical mass of the online community versus the site-by-site implementation. 

Direct Response advertisers can use Behavioral Targeting to identify and re-target their past website visitors who viewed the product/service offer but did not purchase. The past visitors are the most valuable because you have already started the sales process and dialog with them.  A sophisticated Direct Response advertiser will likely create multiple re-targeting segments based on how far into the sales process a specific consumer went before abandoning the purchase.  Once an advertiser ‘identifies’ a visitor as previously visiting their website, they can custom tailor messaging with a strong call to action to try and convince the user of the value of their product/service. 

Similarly, a Direct Response advertiser will also know the basic demographic and behavioral traits of their customers (e.g. past customers are men and women who are 18-24 and have an interest in traveling). The advertiser can then share those traits with an ad network and serve ads to users who show those exact behaviors.  

Using the same example above, the ad network would target: any user who visited the weather and travel sections of ‘site X’ in the past 14 days; displayed an 'interest' in travel content by visiting a certain number of travel-oriented sites within the advertising network, etc. The network will then deliver ads only to those users showing the behaviors of the direct response advertisers’ past customers, giving the product/service an increased chance at being effective.

No matter what your advertising goal is, strongly consider partnering with a behavioral ad network as part of your advertising plan as they can provide the scale and efficiencies that advertisers need to hit their objectives.  Since networks have access to many different types of content, they can offer more behavioral segments and reach than a given publisher can, as most publisher websites are already skewed to one category (or behavior).  

Finally, setting up behavioral campaigns by signing up a behavioral targeting technology and then negotiating with each website that you do a media buy with can be an arduous task with a significant investment in IT and operations resources during the implementation/integration phases. If an advertiser attempts to do this with 50 individual properties, the opportunity cost of those resources may negate the lift provided by the Behavioral Targeting campaign.

Networks have the ability to provide you access to hundreds of sites with a single implementation process, track the most valuable users, identify past website visitors, deliver to those users with any amount of frequency over any time period, and do it with incredible accuracy and ease-of-use.