Exploration of the effect of Category Match Score in search advertising

Categorical (topic) similarity between a web page and an advertisement (ad) text has long been used for contextual advertising. In this paper, we explore the use of the categorical similarity score, referred to as Category Match Score (CMS), in the context of search advertising. In particular, we explore the effect of CMS on various ad-effectiveness prediction tasks, including user-judgment prediction, ad click-through-rate prediction (CTR), and revenue-per-impression prediction. Our extensive experiments on two editorial datasets and one live traffic dataset demonstrate that CMS is one of the strongest features in the judgment prediction task and that CMS-based filtering is very effective in improving revenue per impression as well as CTR. We believe that our analyses can be extremely effective in helping web service providers serve more relevant and profitable ads to users.