Enhancing Targeted Advertising with Social Context Endorsement

Abstract

The success of online advertising depends on the degree of customer acceptance and corresponding click-through rate (CTR). The coverage of traditional online advertising is wide, but the CTR of display advertisements delivered by firms is relatively lower. Whereas targeted advertising can deliver appropriate advertisements to customers based on their traits (disturbance avoidance), advertisements can leverage the power of social influence to improve the degree of acceptance of advertisements. In this paper, by utilizing the power of social influence and context embellishment, we propose a personalized social context endorsement mechanism to enhance the effectiveness of advertisements. According to the results of an experiment conducted on Facebook, the proposed mechanism outperforms other benchmark approaches to improving the CTR and user impressions. This research effectively incorporates the theories of preference similarity, social influence, and moral sentiments and provides advertising sponsors and social media providers with a powerful system to conduct successful advertising campaigns.