In this paper, we analyze the relationship between performance and use of brand terms in the key phrases that link advertisements to searcher queries. We use data that consist of more than 2.5 million daily records from a key word advertising campaign of a major U.S. retailer. The campaign spanned nearly four years, involved approximately $8 million in advertising cost, and generated more than ...

This study examines consumers’ trust of and purchase choice from vendors listed in organic and sponsored search results. We conducted an experimental study with 132 subjects and controlled for several factors related to consumers’ online experiences (website quality, duration of search, product familiarity, and online shopping frequency). Our study shows that trust is lower for sponsored links ...

W study the bidding strategies of vertically differentiated firms that bid for sponsored search advertisement positions for a keyword at a search engine. We explicitly model how consumers navigate and click on sponsored links based on their knowledge and beliefs about firm qualities. Our model yields several interesting insights; a main counterintuitive result we focus on is the “position parad...

Sponsored search is at the center of a multibillion dollar market established by search technology. Accurate ad click prediction is a key component for this market to function since the pricing mechanism heavily relies on the estimation of click probabilities. Lexical features derived from the text of both the query and ads play a significant role, complementing features based on historical cli...

The success of sponsored search has radically affected how people interact with the information, websites, and services on the web. Sponsored search provides the necessary revenue streams to web search engines and is critical to the success of many online businesses. However, there has been limited academic examination of sponsored search, with the exception of online auctions. In this paper, w...

Designing simple mechanisms with desirable revenue guarantees has become a major research agenda in the economics and computation community. However, few mechanisms have been actually applied in industry. In this paper, we aim to bridge the gap between the “simple versus optimal” theory and practice, and propose a class of parameterized mechanisms, tailored for the sponsored search auction sett...

Search engines have become a de facto gateway for people to finding information or shopping online. The reliability of companies in search results is critical as search engines determine what information people access. Major search engines provide two types of results — organic and paid. While paid results have been an advertising boon for search engines, they are expected to contain more comme...

We have collected a set of 1131 textual ads that appeared in the Google Search results when searching for a candidate name running in the 2008 US Congressional elections. We have categorized the advertisers in four different categories: commercial, partisan, non-affiliated, and media. By analyzing the content of the collected ads, we discovered that the majority of them (63%) are commercial ads...

Computational advertising has received a tremendous amount of attention from the business and academic community recently. Great advances have been made in modeling click-through rates in well studied settings, such as, sponsored search and context match. However, local search has received relatively little attention. Geographic nature of local search and associated local browsing leads to inte...

There are m positions to be allocated among n bidders, where n > m. We assume that the (expected) click-through rate of bidder i in position j is of the form αiγj , i.e. separable into an advertiser effect αi ∈ [0, 1] and position effect γj ∈ [0, 1]. We assume that γ1 > γ2 > . . . > γk > 0 and let γj = 0 for j > k. We will sometimes refer to αi as the relevance of bidder i. It is useful to inte...