creators_name: Yan, Jun creators_name: Liu, Ning creators_name: Wang, Gang creators_name: Zhang, Wen creators_name: Jiang, Yun creators_name: Chen, Zheng type: conference_item datestamp: 2009-04-06 19:09:02 lastmod: 2009-04-07 14:02:17 metadata_visibility: show title: How Much Can Behavioral Targeting Help Online Advertising? ispublished: pub full_text_status: public pres_type: paper abstract: Behavioral Targeting (BT) is a technique used by online advertisers to increase the effectiveness of their campaigns, and is playing an increasingly important role in the online advertising market. However, it is underexplored in academia how much BT can truly help online advertising in search engines. In this paper we provide an empirical study on the click-through log of advertisements collected from a commercial search engine. From the experiment results over a period of seven days, we draw three important conclusions: (1) Users who clicked the same ad will truly have similar behaviors on the Web; (2) Click-Through Rate (CTR) of an ad can be averagely improved as high as 670% by properly segmenting users for behavioral targeted advertising in a sponsored search; (3) Using short term user behaviors to represent users is more effective than using long term user behaviors for BT. We conducted statistical t-test which verified that all conclusions drawn in the paper are statistically significant. To the best of our knowledge, this work is the first empirical study for BT on the click-through log of real world ads. date: 2009-04 pagerange: 261-261 event_title: 18th International World Wide Web Conference event_location: Madrid, Spain event_dates: April 20th-24th, 2009 event_type: conference refereed: TRUE citation: Yan, Jun and Liu, Ning and Wang, Gang and Zhang, Wen and Jiang, Yun and Chen, Zheng (2009) How Much Can Behavioral Targeting Help Online Advertising? In: 18th International World Wide Web Conference, April 20th-24th, 2009, Madrid, Spain. document_url: http://www2009.eprints.org/27/1/p261.pdf