How much can behavioral targeting help online advertising?

TLDR

Behavioral Targeting is increasingly used to boost online ad effectiveness, yet its true impact in commercial search engines remains underexplored academically. The study aims to empirically assess how much behavioral targeting can improve online advertising by analyzing click‑through logs from a commercial search engine. The authors conduct an empirical analysis of a seven‑day sponsored search log, segmenting users by short‑term behavior to evaluate CTR gains. The analysis shows that users who click the same ad share similar web behaviors, that behavioral targeting can raise CTR by up to 670 %, and that short‑term user behavior is more effective than long‑term behavior; these results are statistically significant and represent the first empirical study of BT on real‑world ad logs.

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 when looking at how much BT can truly help online advertising in commercial search engines. To answer this question, in this paper we provide an empirical study on the click-through log of advertisements collected from a commercial search engine. From the comprehensively experiment results on the sponsored search log of the commercial search engine over a period of seven days, we can 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 the short term user behaviors to represent users is more effective than using the long term user behaviors for BT. The statistical t-test verifies 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.