Computational advertising

Computational advertising, popularly known as Online advertising or Web advertising, refers to finding the most relevant ads matching a particular context on the web. It is a scientific sub-discipline at the intersection of information retrieval, statistical modeling, machine learning, optimization, large scale search and text analysis. The core problem attacked in computational advertising (CA) is of the match making between the ads and the context. Based on the context, CA can be broadly compartmentalized into following three areas: Sponsored search, Contextual advertising and Social advertising. Sponsored search refers to the placement of ads on search results page. Contextual advertising deals with matching advertisements to the third party web pages. We refer the placements of ads on a social networking page, leveraging user's social contacts as social advertising.