In sponsored search advertising advertisers bid ad links pertaining to a keyword from search engines. This paper presents a pricing model for sponsored search advertising in a dynamic framework. It focuses on the generalized second-price auction, which is widely used by major search engines including Google and Yahoo!. Unlike the assertion in the literature that the number of advertisers and th...

Search engine marketing is currently the most popular form of online advertising. Many advertising agencies and bloggers claim that the success of search engine marketing is driven by the ‘‘long tail”, defined in this research as the many less popular keywords employed by users to search the Internet, and suggest that search engine marketing campaigns need to have hundreds or thousands of keywo...

We study keyword auctions in a model where each advertiser has a value for every slot, which is not necessarily proportional to the number of clicks the advertiser expects to receive in that slot. In our model, advertisers need not only derive values from clicks on their ad, nor do they need to value clicks in all slots equally. This model encompasses a variety of advertising objectives, includ...

In the standard model of sponsored search auctions, an ad is ranked according to the product of its bid and its estimated click-through rate (known as the quality score), where the estimates are taken as exact. This paper re-examines the form of the efficient ranking rule when uncertainty in click-through rates is taken into account. We provide a sufficient condition under which applying an exp...

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 commenc...

We present a characterization of empirical price data from sponsored search auctions. We show that simple models drawing bid values independently from a fixed distribution can be tuned to match empirical data on average, but still fail to account for deviations observed in individual auctions. Hypothesizing that these deviations are due to strategic bidding, we define measures of “jamming” beha...

The transition of the advertisement market from traditional media to the internet has induced a proliferation of marketing agencies specialized in bidding in the auctions used to sell advertisement space on the web. We analyze how bidding delegation to a common marketing agency undermines both revenues and efficiency of the generalized second price auction, the format used by Google and Microso...

In this research we investigate the effect of search engine brand on the evaluation of searching performance. Our research is motivated by the large amount of search traffic directed to a handful of Web search engines, even though many have similar interfaces and performance. We conducted a laboratory experiment with 32 participants using a 42 factorial design confounded in four blocks tomeasur...

To make judicious budget and resource allocation decisions, it is essential to understand the characteristics and performance of keywords used by target shoppers. Taking the approach of understanding consumers’ information needs, we construct a goal-related keyword characterization framework. Most search keywords exhibit more than one of the following characteristics retailer specific, brand sp...

This document contains research in the field of Search Engine Marketing, to be specific it is focused on finding, implementing and evaluating a technique that can be used for keyword suggestion. Based on a set of words describing the subject, a algorithm finds and ranks keyword suggestions that can be used to advertise with. The main goal is to find keywords that are non-obvious, which means th...