As of this quarter in Yahoo Labs, I’m leading a small team of Research Scientists in a new group focused on Native & Mobile Ad Analytics. Native Advertising has become a hot topic in the Web and advertising spaces in recent years. Given it involves creating and placing engaging, relevant content that matches the underlying intent and context of the end-user, there are lots and lots of open research questions in this space. In particular when we think about native advertising in the mobile world!
The ultimate goal of this new group is to conduct research that will enrich our understanding of native and mobile ad experiences and will improve these experiences. We’ll be focusing on large-scale mobile user behavior modeling; understanding and mining mobile-specific signals like mobile device and app use to help enhance mobile ad engagement and conversion; as well as methods and novel studies exploring offline conversion in mobile, i.e. if I show a person an engaging, relevant ad on their device, do they ever act upon that ad in the physical world, e.g. visiting a store, eating at a restaurant, etc. To this end we’ll be analyzing very, very large datasets across a range of Yahoo properties as well as conducting large-scale in-the-wild mobile experiments / studies. Some of the open research questions / challenges in this domain include: Read More