In 2010 sponsored search advertisements generated over $12 billion in revenue for search engines in the US market and accounted for 46% of online advertising revenue. A substantial portion of this revenue was generated by the sale of search keywords using an auction mechanism. We analyze a game-theoretic model to understand the interplay between organic and sponsored links in keyword auctions. ...

In sponsored search it is critical to match ads that are relevant to a query and to accurately predict their likelihood of being clicked. Commercial search engines typically use machine learning models for both query-ad relevance matching and click-through-rate (CTR) prediction. However, matching models are based on the similarity between a query and an ad, ignoring the fact that a retrieved ad...

S search is the mechanism whereby advertisers pay a fee to Internet search engines to be displayed alongside organic (nonsponsored) web search results. Based on prior literature, we draw an analogy between these markets and financial markets. We use the analogy as well as the key differences to present a theoretical framework consisting of a set of research questions about the pricing of keywor...

In this research, we evaluate the effectiveness of the buying funnel as a model for understanding consumer interaction with keyword advertising campaigns on web search engines. We analyze data of nearly 7 million records from a 33 month, $56 million (US) search engine marketing campaign of a major US retailer. We classify key phrases used in this campaign into stages of the buying funnel (i.e.,...

Search engines are playing an increasingly dominant role in providing access to tourism information on the Internet. As such, it is argued that destination marketing organizations (DMOs) must have a substantial understanding of the visibility in search engines in order to create competitive positions within this important marketplace. The goal of this study was to develop a process to assess th...

Multi–domain search engines decompose complex queries addressing several issues at a time into sub–queries, and forwards them to one or more domain–specific content providers, typically implemented as Web services. This enables complex searches (e.g., vacation planning, composed of a hotel, flight, and car search), and allows users to receive aggregated and high quality results from a variety o...

We provide an overview of recent research that has been conducted on the design of sponsored search auctions. We mainly focus on game theoretic and mechanism design aspects of these auctions, and we analyze the issues associated with each of the three participating entities, i.e. the search engine, the advertisers, and the users of the search engine, as well as their resulting behavior. Regardi...

The analysis to date of sponsored search auctions, originally conducted by Varian and independently by Aggarwal et al., has yet to describe more recent developments such as the emergence of interacting advertising exchanges. This paper assess the significance of such phenomena. Building on Gonen and Vassilvitskii’s model of sponsored search with reserve prices we depict advertising networks as ...

A context in sponsored search is additional information about a query, such as the user’s age, gender or location, that can change an advertisement’s relevance or an advertiser’s value for that query. Given a set of contexts, advertiser welfare is maximized if the search engine runs a separate auction for each context; however, due to lack of competition within contexts, this can lead to a sign...

The rapid growth of e-business in the last years made sponsored search a multi-billion dollar industry, which will continue to grow in the upcoming years. Approximately 50% of the total online advertising spending today is used for sponsored search, where search engine providers use sponsored search auctions for pricing the clicks and ranking the ads based on the bids advertisers submit for a s...