Click-through Prediction for Advertising in Twitter Timeline

We present the problem of click-through prediction for advertising in Twitter timeline, which displays a stream of Tweets from accounts a user choose to follow. Traditional computational advertising usually appears in two forms: sponsored search that places ads onto the search result page when a query is issued to a search engine, and contextual advertising that places ads onto a regular, usually static Web page. Compared with these two paradigms, placing ads into a Tweet stream is particularly challenging given the nature of the data stream: the context into which an ad can be placed updates dynamically and never replicates. Every ad is therefore placed into a unique context. This makes the information available for training a machine learning model extremely sparse. In this study, we propose a learning-to-rank method which not only addresses the sparsity of training signals but also can be trained and updated online. The proposed method is evaluated using both offline experiments and online A/B tests, which involve very large collections of Twitter data and real Twitter users. Results of the experiments prove the effectiveness and efficiency of our solution, and its superiority over the current production model adopted by Twitter.