Title
Learning to target: what works for behavioral targeting
Abstract
Understanding what interests and delights users is critical to effective behavioral targeting, especially in information-poor contexts. As users interact with content and advertising, their passive behavior can reveal their interests towards advertising. Two issues are critical for building effective targeting methods: what metric to optimize for and how to optimize. More specifically, we first attempt to understand what the learning objective should be for behavioral targeting so as to maximize advertiser's performance. While most popular advertising methods optimize for user clicks, as we will show, maximizing clicks does not necessarily imply maximizing purchase activities or transactions, called conversions, which directly translate to advertiser's revenue. In this work we focus on conversions which makes a more relevant metric but also the more challenging one. Second is the issue of how to represent and combine the plethora of user activities such as search queries, page views, ad clicks to perform the targeting. We investigate several sources of user activities as well as methods for inferring conversion likelihood given the activities. We also explore the role played by the temporal aspect of user activities for targeting, e.g., how recent activities compare to the old ones. Based on a rigorous offline empirical evaluation over 200 individual advertising campaigns, we arrive at what we believe are best practices for behavioral targeting. We deploy our approach over live user traffic to demonstrate its superiority over existing state-of-the-art targeting methods.
Year
DOI
Venue
2011
10.1145/2063576.2063837
CIKM
Keywords
Field
DocType
individual advertising campaign,inferring conversion likelihood,popular advertising methods optimize,best practice,live user traffic,user activity,users interact,information-poor context,user click,ad click,behavioral targeting,user model,user modeling,advertising
Revenue,Data mining,World Wide Web,Best practice,Behavioral targeting,Computer science,Advertising campaign,User modeling,Page view
Conference
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
19
1.03
10
Authors
7
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Sandeep Pandey142328.86
Mohamed Aly21396.47
Abraham Bagherjeiran3887.99
Andrew Hatch4191.03
Peter Ciccolo52067.73
Adwait Ratnaparkhi61359292.99
Martin Zinkevich71893160.99