Whilst matching settings will differ for different inventory and audiences, there are some generalised settings that apply in most circumstances. This page highlights these general considerations, hopefully empowing you to maximise the relevance of your results through best usage of the Matching options.
Home pages (site.com ):
Generally speaking home pages contain a very wide variety of content - a little something for everyone. Therefore the contextual profile of homepages are very broad - and very non-specific, hence the resultant Contextual profile is too broad to ensure relevant match.
Best default setting:
Behavioural - 100, Contextual 30 (or 10 and 3 respectively of course)
Top Level Category (Sports / Travel / Entertainment)
Seemingly good context here - its a category right?! As long as you have advertisers thinking in these broad terms, Contextual can be used, However, consider for a moment how many 'sub categories' each category has... There are a lot of sports to consider, so, someone interested in Australian Rules football is not necessarily interested in Cheese Rolling, hence 'sport' in many instances is still too broad a context to find relevant matches.
Best default setting:
Behavioural - 70, Contextual 40 (or 7 and 4 respectively of course)
Sub Level Categories (Motorsports / Backpacking / Comedy TV)
In most cases, now the context is becoming quite clear. a particular type of a interest Category. Now we know the user is interested in say, motorsport. There are still other considerations here, such as Motorbikes vs Formula 1 vs, Nascar, but they are somewhat similar interest themes that will, generally speaking, have similar 'experience outcomes' (i.e. watching motorized things zip around a track).
A similar example would be a particular team, (e.g. Manchester United or Liverpool) as opposed to just the broad concept 'Football'. Choosing the correct content here is paramount to a good match where sports teams are concerned.
Best default setting:
Behavioural - 30, Contextual 70 (or 7 and 4 respectively of course)
Sub-Sub Level Categories - Formula 1 (Sport > Motosport), or Beachcombing (Travel > Romatic Excapes)
This level of context is now very good - specific entities with very clear interest levels and themes. At this point, depending on your Advertising Inventory, you may find you lack appropriate amounts of inventory to saturate this somewhat specific audience. Behavioural is used to augment the contextual profile here to 'backup' matches related to the page, with matches related to ~ previous pages.
Best default setting:
Behavioural - 50, Contextual 100 (or 1 and 2 respectively of course)
Sub-Sub-Sub Level Categories - Live Timings (Sport > Motosport > Formula 1), or Oceania (Travel > Romatic Excapes > Beachcombing)
This level of context is now almost too good, with very clear interest levels and themes - the result of which usually equates to lower audience size.Generally speaking, your Advertising Inventory will lack appropriate amounts of inventory to saturate this quite specific audience. Behavioural is used to augment the contextual profile here to 'backup' matches related to the page, with matches related to ~ previous pages. The amount to which you balance the settings here correlate with the amount of Advertising inventory you can maintain for this topic. A safe setting is to 'fallback' to Behavioural more, relying on the general Usage patterns of high level topic consumption history, thereby expanding the amount of advertising inventory again.
Best default setting:
Behavioural - 80, Contextual 50 (or 8 and 5 respectively of course) If you do in fact have a large amount of collateral for such a specific topic, then by all means push Contextual up more.
Conclusion:
As mentioned in the introduction, there is no one setting that provides the best matches for everyone. There are many factors that are at play.
Contextual matching is great for mid to lower content where the context is clear, but not too 'sharp', whilst behavioural matching is much better at the Very high and Very low levels, and may also play a part in the 'middle' of the hierarchy.