Title
To swing or not to swing: learning when (not) to advertise
Abstract
Web textual advertising can be interpreted as a search problem over the corpus of ads available for display in a particular context. In contrast to conventional information retrieval systems, which always return results if the corpus contains any documents lexically related to the query, in Web advertising it is acceptable, and occasionally even desirable, not to show any results. When no ads are relevant to the user's interests, then showing irrelevant ads should be avoided since they annoy the user and produce no economic benefit. In this paper we pose a decision problem "whether to swing", that is, whether or not to show any of the ads for the incoming request. We propose two methods for addressing this problem, a simple thresholding approach and a machine learning approach, which collectively analyzes the set of candidate ads augmented with external knowledge. Our experimental evaluation, based on over 28,000 editorial judgments, shows that we are able to predict, with high accuracy, when to "swing" for both content match and sponsored search advertising.
Year
DOI
Venue
2008
10.1145/1458082.1458216
CIKM
Keywords
Field
DocType
web advertising,ad selection,result quality prediction
Search advertising,Data mining,Decision problem,Information retrieval,Advertising,Computer science,Thresholding,Search problem,Swing
Conference
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
37
1.64
20
Authors
8
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Andrei Broder17357920.20
Massimiliano Ciaramita2135982.34
Marcus Fontoura3111661.74
Evgeniy Gabrilovich44573224.48
Vanja Josifovski52265148.84
Donald Metzler63138141.39
Vanessa Murdock7104955.71
Vanessa Graham Murdock814612.94