Analysis of the Empirical Effects of Contextual Matching Advertising for Online News

Beyond the simple keyword matching methods in contextual advertising, we propose a rich contextual matching (CM) model adopting a classification method for topic targeting and a query expansion method for semantic ad matching. This letter reports on an investigation into the empirical effects of the CM model by comparing the click‐through rates (CTRs) of two practical online news advertising systems. Based on the evaluation results from over 100 million impressions, we prove that the average CTR of our proposed model outperforms that of a traditional model.