9,032 research outputs found

    Inefficiencies in Digital Advertising Markets

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    Digital advertising markets are growing and attracting increased scrutiny. This article explores four market inefficiencies that remain poorly understood: ad effect measurement, frictions between and within advertising channel members, ad blocking, and ad fraud. Although these topics are not unique to digital advertising, each manifests in unique ways in markets for digital ads. The authors identify relevant findings in the academic literature, recent developments in practice, and promising topics for future research

    The Effect of Third Party Investigation on Pay-Per-Click Advertising

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    Click fraud is a critical problem in pay-per-click advertising. While both service providers (SPs) and advertisers employ technologies to identify fraudulent clicks, prior work shows that they cannot be induced to make further improvements to their respective technologies. We consider the use of third-party investigation to address this problem and examine whether the responsibility of investigation payments helps induce both parties to work towards improving their technologies unilaterally. Using a principal-agent setting, we show that the advertiser always has incentives to improve his verification technology and the SP will improve his detection technology only when the detection cost is not too large. Given that the cost of detection technology is likely to be small due to the use of inexpensive online filters, our result suggests that third-party investigation helps induce further enhancements to the technologies and is a good mechanism to address the incentive problems in the click fraud setting

    Pay-per-click advertising: A literature review

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    Digital marketing is being widely employed to efficiently and effectively market products/services to achieve increased sales and generate higher revenues. It allows businesses to effectively communicate desired content to their consumers. Pay-per-click (PPC) is one such form of digital marketing. PPC is often acknowledged for the different advantages it offers, and at the same time, it is notably criticised for fraud and other issues associated with its use. The literature on this subject, although limited, has invested considerable efforts in unveiling the pros and cons of employing PPC as a marketing/advertising strategy. This paper reviews 50 publications on PPC advertising to synthesise their findings and arrive at a common ground for understanding the digital presence and impact of this form of marketing. Alongside discussing the findings, observed limitations and opportunities for future research have been identified and reported

    Search Engine Advertising: Pricing Ads to Context

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    Each search term put into a search engine produces a separate set of results. Correspondingly, each of the sets of ads displayed alongside the results is priced using a separate auction. We investigate how bids for these context-based ads depends on the difficulty of making a match. This contrasts with the existing literature that focuses on the effect of match quality. We examine advertising prices paid by lawyers for 139 Google search terms in 195 locations. Other things being equal, the fewer searches there are on a term, the higher the price. To identify a causal relationship between match-difficulty and prices paid, we exploit a natural experiment in 'ambulance-chaser' regulations across states. When lawyers cannot contact a client by mail and matching becomes more difficult, the relative price per ad click is $0.93 higher. We check the robustness of this result by performing a falsification test using a different ambulance-chaser regulation. Our results suggest that prices are higher for context-based ads when the difficulty of both online and off-line matching increases. This highlights that a major reason why search advertising is profitable is because its use of context can monetize the 'long tail' by reducing friction in the matching process

    Search Engine Advertising Adoption and Utilization: An Empirical Investigation of Inflectional Factors

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    © Taylor & Francis Group, LLC. Search engine advertising (SEA) is a prominent source of revenue for search engine companies, and also a solution for businesses to promote their visibility on the web. However, there is little academic research available about the factors and the extent to which they may influence businesses’ decision to adopt SEA. Building on Theory of Planned Behavior, Technology Acceptance Model, and Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology, this study develops a context-specific model for understanding the factors that influence the decision of businesses to use SEA. Using structural equation modeling and survey data collected from 142 businesses, this research finds that the intention of businesses to use SEA is directly influenced by four factors: (i) attitude toward SEA, (ii) subjective norms, (iii) perceived control over SEA, and (iv) perceived benefits of SEA in terms of increasing web traffic, increasing sales and creating awareness. Furthermore, the research we discover six additional factors that have an indirect influence: (i) trust in search engines, (ii) perceived risk of SEA, (iii) ability to manage keywords and bids, (iv) ability to analyze and monitor outcomes, (v) advertising expertise, and (vi) using external experts

    REAL-TIME AD CLICK FRAUD DETECTION

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    With the increase in Internet usage, it is now considered a very important platform for advertising and marketing. Digital marketing has become very important to the economy: some of the major Internet services available publicly to users are free, thanks to digital advertising. It has also allowed the publisher ecosystem to flourish, ensuring significant monetary incentives for creating quality public content, helping to usher in the information age. Digital advertising, however, comes with its own set of challenges. One of the biggest challenges is ad fraud. There is a proliferation of malicious parties and software seeking to undermine the ecosystem and causing monetary harm to digital advertisers and ad networks. Pay-per-click advertising is especially susceptible to click fraud, where each click is highly valuable. This leads advertisers to lose money and ad networks to lose their credibility, hurting the overall ecosystem. Much of the fraud detection is done in offline data pipelines, which compute fraud/non-fraud labels on clicks long after they happened. This is because click fraud detection usually depends on complex machine learning models using a large number of features on huge datasets, which can be very costly to train and lookup. In this thesis, the existence of low-cost ad click fraud classifiers with reasonable precision and recall is hypothesized. A set of simple heuristics as well as basic machine learning models (with associated simplified feature spaces) are compared with complex machine learning models, on performance and classification accuracy. Through research and experimentation, a performant classifier is discovered which can be deployed for real-time fraud detection

    PERFORMANCE BASED PRICING MODELS IN ONLINE ADVERTISING: CLICK PER MILLE (CPM) AND COST PER CLICK (CPC)

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    The project is focusing on enhancing pricing scheme for Publishers on online advertising method thru Click Per Mille (CPM) and Cost Per Click (CPC). Both have strength and weakness that might affect profitability / revenue on the Publishers side. Dengler, Brian. (2011) state that Internet advertising revenues jumped 23 percent in the United State for the first quarter of 2011 over the same period last year, according to figures released May 27, 2011 by the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) and PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC). In the other words, online advertising is the best way to making money for the player within the industry; Publishers and Advertisers. From the Malaysian perspectives, in order to the players in the online advertising industry is following the guidelines and code of practices, they must referring and dealing with Advertising Standards Authority Malaysia who provide Malaysian Code of Advertising Practice. The Advertising Standards Authority Malaysia (ASA) is the independent body responsible for ensuring that the self-regulatory system works in the public interest. The ASA’s activities include investigating complaints and copy advice on your advertising. The Malaysian Code of Advertising Practice has the support of the following organizations whose representatives constitute the Advertising Standards Authority Malaysia. The Malaysian Code of Advertising Practice has the support of the following organizations whose representatives constitute the Advertising Standards Authority Malaysia; Association of Accredited Advertising Agents Malaysia, Malaysian Advertisers Association, Malaysian Newspaper Publishers Association, and Media Specialists Association. Yuan, S., Abidin, A.Z., Sloan, M., and Wang, J. (2012) state that towards this goal mathematically well grounded Computational Advertising methods are becoming necessary and will continue to develop as a fundamental tool towards the Web. As a vibrant new discipline, Internet advertising requires effort from different research domains including Information Retrieval, Machine Learning, Data Mining and Analytic, Statistics, Economics, and even Psychology to predict and understand user vi behaviors. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive survey on Internet advertising, discussing and classifying the research issues, identifying the recent technologies, and suggesting its future directions. To have a comprehensive picture, we start with a brief history, introduction, and classification of the industry and present a schematic view of the new advertising ecosystem. We then introduce four major participants, namely advertisers, online publishers, ad exchanges and web users; and through analyzing and discussing the major research problems and existing solutions from their perspectives respectively, we discover and aggregate the fundamental problems that characterize the newly formed researched and capture its potential future prospects. Performance based advertising is a form of advertising in which the purchaser pays only when there are measurable results. Performance based advertising is becoming more common with the spread of electronic media, notably the Internet, where it is possible to measure user actions resulting from advertisement. Publishers act as the body who will appoint another body (Advertisers) to advertise their products and services to the publics. However, there still inefficiency between Click Per Mille (CPM) and Cost Per Click (CPC). This project will do research, analyze, evaluate, calculate, enhance and develop current advertising approach for a better performance based pricing models. As the result, the new improvised pricing model where as CPM, CPC or combination of both (Hybrid) might contribute much to the small business and entrepreneurship player’s in Malaysia especially to the Bumiputra’s. The advanced and effective pricing model will help much to them in order to promote and increased the amount of business revenue by applying and practicing the new pricing model on online advertising. The collaboration between Publishers and Advertisers also important to make sure the direct negotiation is realized between them (No more agents) so the win - win situation could be the objective of the pricing model project

    Adversarial behaviours knowledge area

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    The technological advancements witnessed by our society in recent decades have brought improvements in our quality of life, but they have also created a number of opportunities for attackers to cause harm. Before the Internet revolution, most crime and malicious activity generally required a victim and a perpetrator to come into physical contact, and this limited the reach that malicious parties had. Technology has removed the need for physical contact to perform many types of crime, and now attackers can reach victims anywhere in the world, as long as they are connected to the Internet. This has revolutionised the characteristics of crime and warfare, allowing operations that would not have been possible before. In this document, we provide an overview of the malicious operations that are happening on the Internet today. We first provide a taxonomy of malicious activities based on the attacker’s motivations and capabilities, and then move on to the technological and human elements that adversaries require to run a successful operation. We then discuss a number of frameworks that have been proposed to model malicious operations. Since adversarial behaviours are not a purely technical topic, we draw from research in a number of fields (computer science, criminology, war studies). While doing this, we discuss how these frameworks can be used by researchers and practitioners to develop effective mitigations against malicious online operations.Published versio
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