From query log to competitive advertising: A business intelligence method for elaborating consideration set of keywords

With the rapid development of keyword advertising on search engine platforms, competitive advertising becomes a novel strategy for advertisers to gain more potential market share. Though keyword suggestion methods can help match the keywords chosen by the advertisers and the queries in search engine, mainstream keyword suggestion methods suggest keywords by directly extending seed keywords and cannot support competitive keyword advertising effectively, which can further help advertisers understand the competitive intelligence from search engine users´ intention and adopt an competitive advertising strategy to seize competitive advantage. This paper proposes a notion of competitive keyword as well as competitiveness in keyword advertising. Moreover, a novel competitive keyword suggestion method, namely CompKey, is designed to help advertiser find more appropriately competitive keywords based on query log without incorporating further exogenous knowledge, e.g., webpage contents or semantic hierarchy. Furthermore, analyses on two real world cases show the benefits and effectiveness of the proposed notion and the CompKey method.