
Tom Hespos in an article in Imedia Connection on Behavioral targeting makes a startling claim about its effectiveness. He writes that ” It’s not uncommon to see 1,000 percent lifts in clickthrough and conversion rates when adding behavioral targeting to an online ad effort. With that kind of performance differential between targeted and untargeted ads, it’s more important than ever to understand how your ads are being targeted.Behavioral targeting has captivated marketers and agency people alike with promises of increased return, but it wasn’t until fairly recently that behavioral targeting learned how to scale appropriately. For example, when Tacoda was in the enterprise software business, its clients realized that BT’s biggest issue wasn’t identifying people according to their web behaviors but rather how to find enough people fitting certain behavioral criteria to make campaigns worthwhile.”
Its a great read. Also have a look at Neil Perry’s article on “Agencies & Behavioral Targeting”