Ranking for the conversion funnel

  • Authors:
  • Abraham Bagherjeiran;Andrew O. Hatch;Adwait Ratnaparkhi

  • Affiliations:
  • Yahoo!, Santa Clara, CA, USA;Yahoo!, Santa Clara, CA, USA;Yahoo!, Santa Clara, CA, USA

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 33rd international ACM SIGIR conference on Research and development in information retrieval
  • Year:
  • 2010

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Abstract

In contextual advertising advertisers show ads to users so that they will click on them and eventually purchase a product. Optimizing this action sequence, called the conversion funnel, is the ultimate goal of advertising. Advertisers, however, often have very different sub-goals for their ads such as purchase, request for a quote, or simply a site visit. Often an improvement for one advertiser's goal comes at the expense of others. A single ranking function must balance these different goals in order to make an efficient system for all advertisers. We propose a ranking method that globally balances the goals of all advertisers, while simultaneously improving overall performance. Our method has been shown to improve significantly over the baseline in online traffic at a major ad network.