Behavioral Targeting Online Advertising

With the rapid growth of the online advertising market, Behavioral Targeting (BT), which delivers advertisements to users based on understanding of their needs through their behaviors, is attracting more attention. The amount of spend on behaviorally targeted ad spending in the US is projected to reach $4.4 billion in 2012 (Hallerman, 2008). BT is a complex technology, which involves data collection, data mining, audience segmentation, contextual page analysis, predictive modeling and so on. This chapter gives an overview of Behavioral Targeting by introducing the Behavioral Targeting business, followed by classic BT research challenges and solution proposals. We will also point out BT research challenges which are currently under-explored in both industry and academia.