Empirical Study of Soft Clustering Technique for Determining Click Through Rate in Online Advertising

Online advertising is an industry with the potential for maximum revenue extraction. Displaying the ad which is more likely to be clicked plays a crucial role in generating maximum revenue. A high click through rate (CTR) is an indication that the user finds the ad useful and relevant. For suitable placement of ads online and rich user experience, determining CTR has become imperative. Accurate estimation of CTR helps in placement of advertisements in relevant locations which would result in more profits and return of investment for the advertisers and publishers. This paper presents the application of a soft clustering method namely fuzzy c-means (FCM) clustering for determining if a particular ad would be clicked by the user or not. This is done by classifying the ads in the dataset into broad clusters depending on whether they were actually clicked or not. This way the kind of advertisements that the user is interested in can be found out and subsequently more advertisements of the same kind can be recommended to him, thereby increasing the CTR of the displayed ads. Experimental results show that FCM outperforms k-means clustering (KMC) in determining CTR.