Display Advertising Impact: Search Lift and Social Influence

Proceedings of the 17th ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining [KDD'11], 2011 pp.1019-1027

9 Pages Posted: 18 May 2012

See all articles by David Reiley

David Reiley

Pandora Media, Inc.; UC Berkeley School of Information

Randall A. Lewis

Amazon

Panagiotis Papadimitriou

Stanford University

Hector Garcia-Molina

Stanford University

Prabhakar Krishnamurthy

Yahoo! - Yahoo! Research Labs

Date Written: 2011

Abstract

We study the impact of display advertising on user search behavior using a field experiment. In such an experiment, the treatment group users are exposed to some display advertising campaign, while the control group users are not. During the campaign and the post-campaign period we monitor the user search queries and we label them as relevant or irrelevant to the campaign using techniques that leverage the bipartite query-URL click graph. Our results indicate that users who are exposed to the advertising campaign submit 5% to 25% more queries that are relevant to it compared to the unexposed users.

Using the social graph of the experiment users, we also explore how users are affected by their friends who are exposed to ads. Our results indicate that a user with exposed friends is more likely to submit queries relevant to the campaign, as compared to a user without exposed friends. The result is surprising given that the display advertising campaign that we study does not include any incentive for social action, e.g., discount for recommending friends.

Keywords: advertising impact, ad effectivenes, display ads, search lift, social influence, field experiment

JEL Classification: H28 , G3

Suggested Citation

Reiley, David H. and Lewis, Randall A. and Papadimitriou, Panagiotis and Garcia-Molina, Hector and Krishnamurthy, Prabhakar, Display Advertising Impact: Search Lift and Social Influence (2011). Proceedings of the 17th ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining [KDD'11], 2011 pp.1019-1027, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2062382

David H. Reiley

Pandora Media, Inc. ( email )

2101 WEBSTER ST 16TH FLOOR
Oakland, CA 94612
United States

UC Berkeley School of Information ( email )

102 South Hall
Berkeley, CA 94720-4600
United States

Randall A. Lewis (Contact Author)

Amazon ( email )

312-RA-LEWIS (Phone)

Panagiotis Papadimitriou

Stanford University ( email )

Stanford, CA 94305
United States

Hector Garcia-Molina

Stanford University ( email )

Stanford, CA 94305
United States

Prabhakar Krishnamurthy

Yahoo! - Yahoo! Research Labs ( email )

Sunnyvale, CA 94089
United States

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