In the sponsored search model, search engines are paid by businesses that are interested in displaying ads for their site alongside the search results. Businesses bid for keywords, and their ad is displayed when the keyword is queried to the search engine. An important problem in this process is keyword generation: given a business that is interested in launching a campaign, suggest keywords that are related to that campaign. We address this problem by making use of the query logs of the search engine. We identify queries related to a campaign by exploiting the associations between queries and URLs as they are captured by the user’s clicks. These queries form good keyword suggestions since they capture the “wisdom of the crowd ” as to what is related to a site. We formulate the problem as a semi-supervised learning problem, and propose algorithms within the Markov Random Field model. We perform experiments with real query logs, and we demonstrate that our algorithms scale to large query logs and produce meaningful results.

In online advertising, pervasive in commercial search engines, advertisers typically bid on few terms, and the scarcity of data makes ad matching difficult. Suggesting additional bidterms can significantly improve ad clickability and conversion rates. In this paper, we present a large-scale bidterm suggestion system that models an advertiser’s intent and finds new bidterms consistent with that intent. Preliminary experiments show that our system significantly increases the coverage of a state of the art production system used at Yahoo while maintaining comparable precision.

One of the most prevalent online advertising methods is textual advertising. To produce a textual ad, an advertiser must craft a short creative (the text of the ad) linking to a landing page, which describes the product or service being promoted. Furthermore, the advertiser must associate the creative to a set of manually chosen bid phrases representing those Web search queries that should trigger the ad. For efficiency, given a landing page, the bid phrases are often chosen first, and then for each bid phrase the creative is produced using a template. Nevertheless, an ad campaign (e.g., for a large retailer) might involve thousands of landing pages and tens or hundreds of thousands of bid phrases, hence the entire process is very laborious. Our study aims towards the automatic construction of online ad campaigns: given a landing page, we propose several algorithmic methods to generate bid phrases suitable for the given input. Such phrases must be both relevant (that is, reflect the content of the page) and well-formed (that is, likely to be used as queries to a Web search engine). To this end, we use a two phase approach. First, candidate bid phrases are generated by a number of methods, including a (monolingual) translation model capable of generating phrases not contained within the text of the input as well as previously “unseen ” phrases. Second, the candidates are ranked in a probabilistic framework using both the translation model, which favors relevant phrases, as well as a bid phrase language model, which favors well-formed phrases. Empirical evaluation based on a real-life corpus of advertisercreated landing pages and associated bid phrases confirms the value of our approach, which successfully re-generates many of the human-crafted bid phrases and performs significantly better than a pure text extraction method. The research described herein was conducted while the first author was a summer intern at Yahoo! Research.

This paper proposes an efficient relevance feedback based interactive model for keyword generation in sponsored search advertising. We formulate the ranking of relevant terms as a supervised learning problem and suggest new terms for the seed by leveraging user relevance feedback information. Active learning is employed to select the most informative samples from a set of candidate terms for user labeling. Experiments show our approach improves the relevance of generated terms significantly with little user effort required.

We introduce the TAC Ad Auctions game (TAC/AA), a new game for the Trading Agent Competition. The Ad Auctions game investigates complex strategic issues found in real sponsored search auctions that are not captured in current analytical models. We provide an overview of TAC/AA, introducing its key features and design rationale. TAC/AA will debut in summer 2009, with the final tournament commencing in conjunction with the TADA-09 workshop.

Abstract not found

Sponsored search is a new application domain for the feature selection area of research. When a user searches for products or services using the Internet, most of the major search engines would return two sets of results: regular web pages and paid advertisements. An advertising company provides a set of keywords associated with an ad. If one of these keywords is present in a user’s query, the ad is displayed, but the company is charged only if the user actually clicks on the ad. Ultimately, a company would like to advertise

Predicting potential advertisement clicks of users are important for advertisement recommendation, advertisement placement, presentation pricing, and so on. In this paper, several machine learning algorithms including conditional random fields (CRF), support vector machines (SVM), decision tree (DT) and backpropagation neural networks (BPN) are developed to learn user’s click behaviors from advertisement search and click logs. In addition, four levels of features are extracted to represent user search and click intents. Given a user’s search session and a query, machine learning algorithms along with different features are proposed to predict if the user will click advertisements displayed for the query. We further study the impact of feature selection algorithms on the prediction models. Random subspace (RS), F-score (FS) and information gain (IG) are employed to search for a predictive subset of features. The experiments show that CRF model with the random subspace feature selection algorithm achieves the best performance.