Sponsored Search Tutorial

Jon Feldman and I gave our SIGMETRICS tutorial a few days ago. Sponsored search is often thought of as a game between two parties: the advertisers and the search company. But implicit in this is the third party: the search users. I did the overview at the beginning of the tutorial laying out this three party game explicitly; Jon presented technical results on the advertisers' and search engines' points of view and I presented technical results on the users' point of view. The room was small, but the audience spilled over (we had to go up against Ed Coffman's keynote in parallel). The audience was divided between the ones who wanted an overview to the sponsored search ad system and those who wanted to get to the submdular optimization soonest.

We ran an ad related to our tutorial with Google and showed the statistics of clicks, impressions, click-thru-rate etc. The details are enclosed.