Visual Congruent Ads for Image Search

TL;DR

This paper introduces a system for selecting and placing visual ads in image search results based on visual similarity, enhancing user satisfaction without reducing ad visibility or brand recall.

Contribution

It presents a novel method that matches ads to images by visual similarity and optimizes their placement to improve user experience in image search.

Findings

Significant increase in user satisfaction

No reduction in ad visibility or brand recall

Effective visual similarity matching

Abstract

The quality of user experience online is affected by the relevance and placement of advertisements. We propose a new system for selecting and displaying visual advertisements in image search result sets. Our method compares the visual similarity of candidate ads to the image search results and selects the most visually similar ad to be displayed. The method further selects an appropriate location in the displayed image grid to minimize the perceptual visual differences between the ad and its neighbors. We conduct an experiment with about 900 users and find that our proposed method provides significant improvement in the users' overall satisfaction with the image search experience, without diminishing the users' ability to see the ad or recall the advertised brand.