In the Mood to Click? Towards Inferring Receptiveness to Search Advertising

We present a method for modeling, and automaticallyinferring, the current interest of a user in searchadvertising. Our task is complementary to that of predictingad relevance or commercial intent of a query in the aggregate, since the user intent may vary significantly for the same query. To achieve this goal, we develop a fine-grained user interaction model for inferring searcher receptiveness to advertising. We show that modeling the search context and behavior can significantly improve the accuracy of ad clickthrough prediction for the current user, compared to the existing state-of-the-artclassification methods that do not model this additional session level contextual and interaction information. In particular, our experiments over thousands of search sessions from hundreds of real users demonstrate that our model is more effective at predicting ad clickthrough within the same search session. Our work has other potential applications, such as improving searchinterface design (e.g., varying the number or type of ads) based on user interest, and behavioral targeting (e.g., identifying users interested in immediate purchase).