Semantic Advertising
Ame Wongsa
INF 385T – Semantic Web
Background – Online Advertising
 Banner ads allowed tracking of click through rates
 Arms race for people’s attention led to increasingly intrusive
ads (blinking banners, pop-ups, video ads, inline ads, etc.
 GoTo.com started pay-per-click-ads and keyword bidding
 Google AdWords and AdSense network
 Contextual Advertising
 Behavioral Targeting
Contextual Advertising
 Google AdSense and Yahoo ContentMatch
 Based on keyword scans of text of website or internet search
 Misplacement of ads can occur due to keywords with various meanings
 “If it bleeds, it leads” (not true on the web)
 Filtering certain ads for certain context and editorial oversight
 Focused and commercial content works well. Ex. Blogs
 Other Problems:
 Popularity increases competition and reduces ROI
 Companies buy rivals keywords or rivals drive up cost of ads.
Behavioral Targeting
 Use individual browsing behavior (page visited,
searches, purchase history) to select advertising to
display.
 Used with geography, demographics, content.
 Uses cookies -- Privacy issues
What is important to online
advertisers?
 Targeted advertising
 Preventing negative associations
 ROI – Return On Investment
 Competition, brand protection
 CTR – Click Through Rate
 Pay per clicks (PPC), Cost per action (CPA), cost per
thousand (CPM)
Semantic Advertising
Four Kinds:
1. Contextual advertising with semantic technology
2. Semantic search advertising
3. Dynamic advertising content
4. Advertising inside semantic data
Source: http://www.chiefmartec.com/2008/09/semantic-advertisingof-4-different-kinds.html?cid=130782220#comments
1. Contextual Advertising with
semantic technology
 Use semantic technology as a competitive advantage to
contextual advertising
 Goal is to understand content of page to provide more
targeted advertising
 Peer93*
 Base on proprietary algorithms for natural language processing
and machine learning to understand page meaning and
sentiment
 iSense
 taxonomy base system hand built by 40 linguists and
lexicographers
2. Semantic search advertising
 Semantic search engines try to provide people with
better search experience
 Advertising can provide a business model
 May bid on concepts and relationships instead of
keywords
 Example of semantic search engines: Powerset, Hakia
3. Dynamic advertising content
 Advertisers expose offerings in XML semantic data and
agencies read data to dynamically change content of ad
accordingly
 Little coordination to update ads
 Require standardized format of semantic data across
advertisers
 Ex. Dapper’s MashupAds platform
 Dapper is a data extraction and API creation service and is
used for semantic indexing.
4. Advertising inside semantic
data
 Ex. Yahoo! SearchMonkey
 Allow developers and site owners to use structured data to
make Yahoo! Search results more useful and visually
appealing, and to drive more relevant traffic to their site
 Structured data: microformats, RDFa/eRDF, atom feeds,
web services
 Example
4. Advertising inside semantic
data (cont.)
 Content providers can charge advertisers to provide
semantic data
 Semantic listing is more noticeable even if they have lower
ranking and useful presentation can increase ranking
 Search engine optimization
 Ex. OpenCalais
 Generates semantic metadata from content
(text/HTML/XML) using natural language processing,
machine learning and other methods.
 Semantic advertising by adding sponsor’s metadata.
Advertising and the semantic web
 Semantic advertising is involved in improving
experiences for users (who don’t care about technology)
 Better advertising as a reward can create incentive for
good semantic data.
References:
 Brinker, Scott. (2008, September). Semantic advertising: 4 different
kinds. Retrieved October 1, 2008, from
http://www.chiefmartec.com/2008/09/semantic-advertising-of-4different-kinds.html?cid=130782220#comments
 Glaser, Mark. (2005, July). The good, bad and ugly of contextual ads
from Google, Yahoo. Retrieved October 1, 2008, from
http://www.ojr.org/ojr/stories/050706glaser/
 Glaser, Mark. (2007, June). Your Guide to Online Advertising.
Retrieved October 1, 2008, from
http://www.pbs.org/mediashift/2007/06/your-guide-to-onlineadvertising178.html
 Miller, Paul. (2008, October). Scott Brinker talks with Talis about
Semantic Marketing. Retrieved October 1, 2008, from
http://blogs.talis.com/nodalities/2008/10/scott-brinker-talks-withtalis-about-semantic-marketing.php