User-aware advertisability

In sponsored search, many studies focus on finding the most relevant advertisements (ads) and their optimal ranking for a submitted query. Determining whether it is suitable to show ads has received less attention. In this paper, we introduce the concept of user-aware advertisability, which refers to the probability of ad-click on sponsored ads when a specific user submits a query. When computing the advertisability for a given query-user pair, we first classify the clicked web pages based on a pre-defined category hierarchy and use the aggregated topical categories of clicked web pages to represent user preference. Taking user preference into account, we then compute the ad-click probability for this query-user pair. Compared with existing methods, the experimental results show that user preference is of great value for generating user-specific advertisability. In particular, our approach that computes advertisability per query-user pair outperforms the two state-of-the-art methods that compute advertisability per query in terms of a variant of the normalized Discounted Cumulative Gain metric.