22,590 research outputs found
You Must Have Clicked on this Ad by Mistake! Data-Driven Identification of Accidental Clicks on Mobile Ads with Applications to Advertiser Cost Discounting and Click-Through Rate Prediction
In the cost per click (CPC) pricing model, an advertiser pays an ad network
only when a user clicks on an ad; in turn, the ad network gives a share of that
revenue to the publisher where the ad was impressed. Still, advertisers may be
unsatisfied with ad networks charging them for "valueless" clicks, or so-called
accidental clicks. [...] Charging advertisers for such clicks is detrimental in
the long term as the advertiser may decide to run their campaigns on other ad
networks. In addition, machine-learned click models trained to predict which ad
will bring the highest revenue may overestimate an ad click-through rate, and
as a consequence negatively impacting revenue for both the ad network and the
publisher. In this work, we propose a data-driven method to detect accidental
clicks from the perspective of the ad network. We collect observations of time
spent by users on a large set of ad landing pages - i.e., dwell time. We notice
that the majority of per-ad distributions of dwell time fit to a mixture of
distributions, where each component may correspond to a particular type of
clicks, the first one being accidental. We then estimate dwell time thresholds
of accidental clicks from that component. Using our method to identify
accidental clicks, we then propose a technique that smoothly discounts the
advertiser's cost of accidental clicks at billing time. Experiments conducted
on a large dataset of ads served on Yahoo mobile apps confirm that our
thresholds are stable over time, and revenue loss in the short term is
marginal. We also compare the performance of an existing machine-learned click
model trained on all ad clicks with that of the same model trained only on
non-accidental clicks. There, we observe an increase in both ad click-through
rate (+3.9%) and revenue (+0.2%) on ads served by the Yahoo Gemini network when
using the latter. [...
Beyond Keywords and Relevance: A Personalized Ad Retrieval Framework in E-Commerce Sponsored Search
On most sponsored search platforms, advertisers bid on some keywords for
their advertisements (ads). Given a search request, ad retrieval module
rewrites the query into bidding keywords, and uses these keywords as keys to
select Top N ads through inverted indexes. In this way, an ad will not be
retrieved even if queries are related when the advertiser does not bid on
corresponding keywords. Moreover, most ad retrieval approaches regard rewriting
and ad-selecting as two separated tasks, and focus on boosting relevance
between search queries and ads. Recently, in e-commerce sponsored search more
and more personalized information has been introduced, such as user profiles,
long-time and real-time clicks. Personalized information makes ad retrieval
able to employ more elements (e.g. real-time clicks) as search signals and
retrieval keys, however it makes ad retrieval more difficult to measure ads
retrieved through different signals. To address these problems, we propose a
novel ad retrieval framework beyond keywords and relevance in e-commerce
sponsored search. Firstly, we employ historical ad click data to initialize a
hierarchical network representing signals, keys and ads, in which personalized
information is introduced. Then we train a model on top of the hierarchical
network by learning the weights of edges. Finally we select the best edges
according to the model, boosting RPM/CTR. Experimental results on our
e-commerce platform demonstrate that our ad retrieval framework achieves good
performance
Born to trade: a genetically evolved keyword bidder for sponsored search
In sponsored search auctions, advertisers choose a set of keywords based on products they wish to market. They bid for advertising slots that will be displayed on the search results page when a user submits a query containing the keywords that the advertiser selected. Deciding how much to bid is a real challenge: if the bid is too low with respect to the bids of other advertisers, the ad might not get displayed in a favorable position; a bid that is too high on the other hand might not be profitable either, since the attracted number of conversions might not be enough to compensate for the high cost per click.
In this paper we propose a genetically evolved keyword bidding strategy that decides how much to bid for each query based on historical data such as the position obtained on the previous day. In light of the fact that our approach does not implement any particular expert knowledge on keyword auctions, it did remarkably well in the Trading Agent Competition at IJCAI2009
An Efficient Bandit Algorithm for Realtime Multivariate Optimization
Optimization is commonly employed to determine the content of web pages, such
as to maximize conversions on landing pages or click-through rates on search
engine result pages. Often the layout of these pages can be decoupled into
several separate decisions. For example, the composition of a landing page may
involve deciding which image to show, which wording to use, what color
background to display, etc. Such optimization is a combinatorial problem over
an exponentially large decision space. Randomized experiments do not scale well
to this setting, and therefore, in practice, one is typically limited to
optimizing a single aspect of a web page at a time. This represents a missed
opportunity in both the speed of experimentation and the exploitation of
possible interactions between layout decisions.
Here we focus on multivariate optimization of interactive web pages. We
formulate an approach where the possible interactions between different
components of the page are modeled explicitly. We apply bandit methodology to
explore the layout space efficiently and use hill-climbing to select optimal
content in realtime. Our algorithm also extends to contextualization and
personalization of layout selection. Simulation results show the suitability of
our approach to large decision spaces with strong interactions between content.
We further apply our algorithm to optimize a message that promotes adoption of
an Amazon service. After only a single week of online optimization, we saw a
21% conversion increase compared to the median layout. Our technique is
currently being deployed to optimize content across several locations at
Amazon.com.Comment: KDD'17 Audience Appreciation Awar
Scalable Semantic Matching of Queries to Ads in Sponsored Search Advertising
Sponsored search represents a major source of revenue for web search engines.
This popular advertising model brings a unique possibility for advertisers to
target users' immediate intent communicated through a search query, usually by
displaying their ads alongside organic search results for queries deemed
relevant to their products or services. However, due to a large number of
unique queries it is challenging for advertisers to identify all such relevant
queries. For this reason search engines often provide a service of advanced
matching, which automatically finds additional relevant queries for advertisers
to bid on. We present a novel advanced matching approach based on the idea of
semantic embeddings of queries and ads. The embeddings were learned using a
large data set of user search sessions, consisting of search queries, clicked
ads and search links, while utilizing contextual information such as dwell time
and skipped ads. To address the large-scale nature of our problem, both in
terms of data and vocabulary size, we propose a novel distributed algorithm for
training of the embeddings. Finally, we present an approach for overcoming a
cold-start problem associated with new ads and queries. We report results of
editorial evaluation and online tests on actual search traffic. The results
show that our approach significantly outperforms baselines in terms of
relevance, coverage, and incremental revenue. Lastly, we open-source learned
query embeddings to be used by researchers in computational advertising and
related fields.Comment: 10 pages, 4 figures, 39th International ACM SIGIR Conference on
Research and Development in Information Retrieval, SIGIR 2016, Pisa, Ital
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