adCenter is Microsoft’s online advertising platform. The platform enables advertisers to connect with target consumers across multiple digital touch points through both brand and direct marketing messages. The adCenter R&D team at MSIDC is focused on the key areas of the Paid Search and Contextual Ad products. Creating enabling tools for manual review of ads and keywords ensures that irrelevant and poor quality advertisements do not make it to our users. In addition, the team develops technologies that significantly enhance the relevance of ads that are delivered by adCenter to be displayed along with Live Search results and content from other publishers. These contributions increase return on investment (ROI) for our advertisers and better audience engagement as they see more relevant ads.

Relevance and Revenue

Ad selection and ranking is similar to the information retrieval problem in Search, but with the added complexity of managing publisher yield and advertiser return on investment. The adCenter engines employ a variety of machine learning based models that leverage hundreds of data-points to select and rank ads. We are constantly analyzing vast amounts of historical data to identify behavioral patterns, seasonal trends, filter fraudulent clicks and improving our relevance algorithms to help improve user experience, advertiser ROI and publisher revenue.

On the revenue and relevance front, the MSIDC team is responsible for the ad selection, matching and ranking engines for Contextual Ads on MSN and other network sites. This includes online and offline models for click prediction, relevance verification and online auction for image as well as text ads. In addition to building new features, the team actively designs and performs a number of online experiments, analyzing data, monitoring key business performance indicators and fine tuning the relevance engines. The team is also responsible for the development of tools that enable Microsoft to manage online experiments, monitor the quality of its ads and analyze and diagnose ranking issues for both Paid Search and Contextual Ad systems.

Editorial Verification

adCenter has laid out strict guidelines for advertisers to effectively create ads that meet their advertising needs. These guidelines vary from simple format and grammar recommendations to complicated policy driven enforcements regarding trademarks, pharmacy, gambling, drugs, etc. Thousands of new campaigns are created by advertisers everyday via different input channels like adCenter Web UI, API and desktop campaign management tools. Every single keyword, ad text and associated landing page from these campaigns is subjected to editorial checks. A combination of automated and manual approach is used at different stages of the entire process to monitor and enforce these editorial guidelines.

The adCenter editorial team at MSIDC is constantly innovating to make these automated and manual workflows efficient for end-to-end system, resulting in better advertiser and user experience. The team constantly monitors and identifies trends in editorial landscape and modifies these manual editorial workflows to achieve better cost efficiencies, customer SLAs and higher accuracy of decision. The team is responsible for enabling a framework of tools to manage rules and policies pertaining to different markets and inflow of manual editorial jobs. It is focused on innovating in areas that will enable the business to scale many times in volumes in existing markets as well as launch in new markets.