Modeling and Predicting User Behavior in Sponsored Search

Implicit user feedback, including click-through and subsequent browsing behavior, is crucial for evaluating and improving the quality of results returned by search engines. Several recent studies [1, 2, 3, 13, 25] have used post-result browsing behavior including the sites visited, the number of clicks, and the dwell time on site in order to improve the ranking of search results. In this paper, we first study user behavior on sponsored search results (i.e.. the advertisements displayed by search engines next to the organic results), and compare this behavior to that of organic results. Second, to exploit post-result user behavior for better ranking of sponsored results, we focus on identifying patterns in user behavior and predict expected on-site actions in future instances. In particular, we show how post-result behavior depends on various properties of the queries, advertisement, sites, and users, and build a classifier using properties such as these to predict certain aspects of the user behavior. Additionally, we develop a generative model to mimic trends in observed user activity using a mixture of pareto distributions. We conduct experiments based on billions of real navigation trails collected by a major search engine's browser toolbar.