Using landing pages for sponsored search ad selection

We explore the use of the landing page content in sponsored search ad selection. Specifically, we compare the use of the ad's intrinsic content to augmenting the ad with the whole, or parts, of the landing page. We explore two types of extractive summarization techniques to select useful regions from the landing pages: out-of-context and in-context methods. Out-of-context methods select salient regions from the landing page by analyzing the content alone, without taking into account the ad associated with the landing page. In-context methods use the ad context (including its title, creative, and bid phrases) to help identify regions of the landing page that should be used by the ad selection engine. In addition, we introduce a simple yet effective unsupervised algorithm to enrich the ad context to further improve the ad selection. Experimental evaluation confirms that the use of landing pages can significantly improve the quality of ad selection. We also find that our extractive summarization techniques reduce the size of landing pages substantially, while retaining or even improving the performance of ad retrieval over the method that utilize the entire landing page.