Towards Personalized Advertising in Sponsored Search

Web advertising is one of the major sources of income for numerous search engines, news sites and non-commercial publishers. Textual ads, characterized by Sponsored Search (SS) and Content Match (CM), make up a significant portion of Web advertising. In SS, with limited information about ad contents, given a query, the challenge is to place relevant ads alongside organic search results. Organic search results are ranked based on their relevance to search keyword. However, SS results are not necessarily ranked purely based on relevance due to various factors influencing the ads overall ranking such as bid phrase and displayed position. The displayed ads may not relate to a user’s information need. In this paper, a study associating ads and users, referred to as personalized advertising is proposed. User profiles are used as external knowledge to establish the relationship between the users and the ads.