A new report by BlueLithium's BL Labs finds that behavioral ads result in higher click-through rates when shown in a contextually relevant category, but are more likely to lead to a conversion when viewed out of context.

BL Labs discovered that ads shown in the same context as behavior had a higher click-through rates (CTR) in seven of nine categories, while ads shown in a different context had a higher conversion, or "action-through" rates (ATR), in five of the categories, ClickZ reports. The overall CTR for behaviorally targeted ads shown in a different content category than that of the behavior is 108 percent higher than ads shown in the same category, BlueLithium reported (pdf).

That is, in general, people click more often on behaviorally targeted ads when the ads appear out of context. The overall ATR for behaviorally targeted ads shown out of context is 19 percent higher than behaviorally targeted ads shown in context (weighted average).

"Marketers need to think twice before acting on a knee-jerk reaction to advertise in-context," Dave Zinman, BlueLithium's SVP of products, explained to ClickZ. "In traditional media, there has never been a way to target behaviorally, so they had to target contextually. They can get more efficiency out of their media buy if they use custom segmentation for each campaign."

The BL Labs study examined more than 400 million impressions across numerous sites in BlueLithium's network over time, evaluating CTR and ATR across several behavioral segments and contextual categories. Nine behavioral categories that had over 10 million impressions were analyzed for patterns when looking across various contextual categories.