Paper Info
Title
A search-based method for forecasting ad impression in contextual advertising
Abstract
Contextual advertising (also called content match) refers to the placement of small textual ads within the content of a generic web page. It has become a significant source of revenue for publishers ranging from individual bloggers to major newspapers. At the same time it is an important way for advertisers to reach their intended audience. This reach depends on the total number of exposures of the ad (impressions) and its click-through-rate (CTR) that can be viewed as the probability of an end-user clicking on the ad when shown. These two orthogonal, critical factors are both difficult to estimate and even individually can still be very informative and useful in planning and budgeting advertising campaigns. In this paper, we address the problem of forecasting the number of impressions for new or changed ads in the system. Producing such forecasts, even within large margins of error, is quite challenging: 1) ad selection in contextual advertising is a complicated process based on tens or even hundreds of page and ad features; 2) the publishers' content and traffic vary over time; and 3) the scale of the problem is daunting: over a course of a week it involves billions of impressions, hundreds of millions of distinct pages, hundreds of millions of ads, and varying bids of other competing advertisers. We tackle these complexities by simulating the presence of a given ad with its associated bid over weeks of historical data. We obtain an impression estimate by counting how many times the ad would have been displayed if it were in the system over that period of time. We estimate this count by an efficient two-level search algorithm over the distinct pages in the data set. Experimental results show that our approach can accurately forecast the expected number of impressions of contextual ads in real time. We also show how this method can be used in tools for bid selection and ad evaluation.
Year
DOI
Venue
2009
10.1145/1526709.1526776
WWW
Keywords
Field
DocType
contextual advertising,contextual ad,ad selection,distinct page,budgeting advertising campaign,search-based method,small textual ad,ad evaluation,ad impression,changed ad,real time,ad feature,click through rate,web pages,search algorithm,online advertising
World Wide Web,Contextual advertising,Search algorithm,Share of voice,Web page,Computer science,Impression,Online advertising,Newspaper,Artificial intelligence,Advertising campaign,Machine learning
Conference
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
8
0.70
14
Authors
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Xuerui Wang11735123.38
Andrei Broder27357920.20
Marcus Fontoura3111661.74
Vanja Josifovski42265148.84