The anatomy of an ad: structured indexing and retrieval for sponsored search.

The core task of sponsored search is to retrieve relevant ads for the user's query. Ads can be retrieved either by exact match, when their bid term is identical to the query, or by advanced match, which indexes ads as documents and is similar to standard information retrieval (IR). Recently, there has been a great deal of research into developing advanced match ranking algorithms. However, no previous research has addressed the ad indexing problem. Unlike most traditional search problems, the ad corpus is defined hierarchically in terms of advertiser accounts, campaigns, and ad groups, which further consist of creatives and bid terms. This hierarchical structure makes indexing highly non-trivial, as naively indexing all possible "displayable" ads leads to a prohibitively large and ineffective index. We show that ad retrieval using such an index is not only slow, but its precision is suboptimal as well. We investigate various strategies for compact, hierarchy-aware indexing of sponsored search ads through adaptation of standard IR indexing techniques. We also propose a new ad retrieval method that yields more relevant ads by exploiting the structured nature of the ad corpus. Experiments carried out over a large ad test collection from a commercial search engine show that our proposed methods are highly effective and efficient compared to more standard indexing and retrieval approaches.