experimental comparison of scalable online ad serving
Online Ad Servers attempt to find best ads to serve for a given triggering user event. The performance of ads may be measured in several ways. We suggest a formulation in which the ad network tries to maximize revenue subject to relevance constraints. We describe several algorithms for ad selection and review their complexity. We tested these algorithms using Microsoft ad network from October 1 2006 to February 8 2007. Over 3 billion impressions, 8 million combinations of triggers with ads, and a number of algorithms were tested over this period. We discover curious differences between ad-servers aimed at revenue versus clickthrough rate.
ad serving online advertising