Web Advertisement

Rong Jin

Basic Forms of Advertising Brand advertising

Creates a distinct favorable image

Direct-marketing Advertising that involves a "direct response”:

buy, subscribe, vote, donate, etc, now or soon

Examples

Web AdvertisingThere are a lot of ad. on the web …

Search Advertising

Display Advertising

Revenue of Internet Advertising

Different Forms of Internet Ad.

Internet advertising revenues by format in percents - 1998-2004.

Search Advertising Advertising that is related to the web search Becomes the driving force sustaining monetization

of Web services 63% of the advertisers want to target users according to

their interests 49% want to target users on their geographical locations

Two types Keyword-targeted advertising Content-targeted advertising

Keyword-targeted Advertising Introduced by Overtune in 1998 Ads are related to the user’s queries Paid list

Keyword-targeted Advertising Advertiser

Associate ad with keywords Bid on the keywords

The higher the bid, the greater the chances that the ad will be shown the paid list

Only pay when users click on the ad

Presentation of ads A title, a short description, and a URL Creative = title + short description Buzzing word: “free”, “click here”, “enter now to win …”

Conversion: the user jump to the landing page and starts transaction

Content-targeted Advertising Ads are related to the

content of triggering pages

Automated selection of ads Assign each page with

keywords and key categories

The dominant contextual approach in Web marketing.

Paid list

Search Advertising Business All large players (Google, Yahoo, MSN) now own:

Web search engine Advertising platform + network

They are both a search engine and an ad agency Google

Own engine for keyword ads (Adwords) Bought Applied Semantics (context ads, Adsense)

Yahoo Bought Inktomi, AltaVista, AlltheWeb, Overture Search: Inktomi Ads: Overture (keyword, context)

MSN Used search from Inktomi + own corpus. Has now its own (Bing) Used ads from Overture, has now own platform (“AdCenter” in 2006)

Search Advertising Network Failure of search advertising in the early days

Poor matching between ads and keywords/content Irrelevant messages annoy users

Questionable practice popping up ads in pages without the permission of their

publishers, associating their images with improper companies

Solution: search advertising network Form a network so that all the participants are benefited

Search Advertising Network

Search advertising network

Search Advertising Network: Broker Responsible for the maintenance of the

network. Decide advertisers and publishers that participate

of the network Decide the publishing policies

Responsible for the auction system Interfaces, databases, controlled vocabularies Match ads to keywords/content

Search Advertising Network

Search advertising network

Search Advertising Network: Advertiser Goal:

Popularize their brands and commercialize their products and services.

Their ads are referred to quality users Compete among themselves for keywords by

bidding in an auction system. Pay to the broker according to the traffic Tune the parameters dynamically according to the

performance report

Advantages of Web Ad. Accountability

Measure the performance and provide feedback about marketing campaigns and strategies.

Dynamically adjust their strategies Flexibility

Target users according to their past behavior, interests, demographic information, and local information

Search Advertising Network

Search advertising network

Search Advertising Network: Publisher Goal:

Monetize their pages through the loyalty of their audience Simply displaying ads will annoy most users Search-related ads are more targeted positive user

attitude Provide brokers with the description of their pages

Manually assigned keywords or categories Essential topics derived automatically

Diverse publishers search engines and online directories Small publishers

Search Advertising Network: Users Goal: getting relevant information from the

publishers. Describing their information needs by

keywords or by surfing in Web pages Average four hundred million queries per day in

2003; 40% were of commercial nature Occasionally click on the ads exhibited, jump

to the advertisers’ pages, and start commercial transactions.

Example (I) We advertised a tutorial of WWW 2006 Bid on keywords

www2006 $0.20 per click “www 2006” $0.07 per click “www conference” $0.10 per click Prabhakar Raghavan $0.10 per click Andrei Broder $0.07 per click

Example (II)

Example (III): Report

Distribution of Cost Per Click (CPC)

Not a Zip’s law !

Challenging Questions For advertisers

What words to buy? How much to pay? Arbitrage among keywords/suppliers, try to cherry pick

demographics How to fight with spam Dilemma between the overall cost and the number of clicks

For publisher (search engines) How to price the words?

Let the market decide: bidding! When to place ad? (a matching problem) How to price “extended” or “broad” match ? Long term costs (bad user experience) Dilemma between relevance and short term profit

Find the Right Ad Relatively simple on bid phrases Similar to Web Search, but

Ranking depends on both bids and relevance Each ad entry = a “small page” Different metadata (keywords, title, URL) Enormous historical data (billions of searches/ad/clicks

records) What about queries on which there is no bid?

Find the Right Ad Advertiser can bid on “broad queries” and/or

“concept queries” Bid on any query that contains “sigir”or the

“sigir”concept. Pitfall: partial matching

Ad: A seller of car water pumps might bid on “pumps”. Query: “breast pumps” or “black pumps”

Auction and Pricing Advertisers compete for each keyword Advertiser pays the search engine when a

searcher clicked on a displayed ad Challenges

Which keywords to bid? How much to bid for each keyword? How to adjust the biding according to the

performance?

Search Advertising System D: a collection of documents (i.e., ads) q: a user query M: q D {0, 1}

A matching function Decide if an ad is relevant to the query q

R: q D [0, 1] A ranking function Decide the relative rank of an ad to query q

Search Advertising System

Miele ad1ad2 ad3

ad4 ad5 ad6

QueryAd Database

ad1 ad3 ad4

Identify relevant ads by M

Rank ads by RAdvertisersClick Data

Change bid

Bid different keywords

Relevance Matching The quality of relevance matching affects the

user’s perception of the web content Exact match and approximate match

Exact match: query = ad keywords Approximate match: partial match

Similar to typical IR methods Query expansion to include synonyms and related

terms

Conversion Rate vs. Query Size

Intuition: the longer the query the higher the conversion rate

Why?

Conversion Rate vs. Query Size

Intuition: the longer the query the higher the conversion rate

It is because most brand names are

single word

Conversion Rate vs. Query Size

Too specific queries

Why?

Ranking Satisfy interests of different parties

Users: relevant information Advertisers: quality traffic at a minimum cost and

with a minimum risk of negative user attitude Brokers and publishers: maximize their revenues

at the minimum risk of negative user attitude

Click Through Rate vs Ranking

A simple strategy: always put the most expensive ads on the top (what is wrong with this idea?)

Paid Placement Strategy

Perceived Relevance

Expected Profits

Rank by willingness to pay (WTP ranking) Rank by willingness to pay times click-through rate (WTPC

ranking), i.e., the product between their bids and their expected click-through rate. The reward for a click is larger if it is received in a lower rank.

Fraud Detection The more publishers have users clicking in the ads

shown in their pages, the more advertisers will pay to them.

Publisher can fake traffic to attract advertisers CompUSA spent more than $10 millions in 2004 due to

fake traffic. Characteristics of fake traffic

Distribution of clicks over time Distribution of clicks over users A standard classification

Measurements Advertisers need to get detailed feedback about their

performance Cost per thousand impression:

Traditional pricing model Payments were measured mainly based on the quantity of

impressions of ads Uncertainty on the benefit of advertisers

Performance based metrics Direct estimate of advertiser’s return of investments

Measurements User clicks may not convert Require reliable estimate of the return of their

investments (ROI). Keyword-targeted advertising performs better

than content-targeted advertising Users are less likely to generate a conversion

while surfing.