Online platforms attract hundreds of millions of users, who post regularly on many topics. However, the algorithms used to direct them to content have faced criticism. HKUST’s Jia Liu and a colleague examine the phenomenon of “popularity bias” in recommender systems, taking advantage of a quasi-experiment conducted by China’s biggest online knowledge-sharing ... Read More

Moment marketing, a new sales strategy that leverages technology to synchronize online advertising with trending news and events in the real world, has taken the advertising world by storm. Facing ever fiercer competition for customers’ attention across channels, brands are increasingly turning to moment marketing to help them deliver the right message to ... Read More

Every minute, more than 3 million queries are submitted via Google’s search engine. Analyzing data on these queries, along with page results and subsequent clicks, can shed light on the kinds of information that consumers seek each day. However, search intentions may be influenced by variables such as the weather and even the TV shows aired on a certain day ... Read More

To defeat others in the battle for market share, firms routinely launch different loyalty programs, deeply influencing customer purchasing decisions. The widespread availability of such programs imply competing firms face the challenge of disentangling the interactive impact to make informed pricing and promotional decisions, especially in competitive ... Read More

A closer look into three main kinds of data-driven marketing analytics – descriptive, predictive and prescriptive. Assistant Professor LIU Jia Department of Marketing, HKUST Business School Data-driven marketing simply put means using quantitative methods to derive meaning from data to make informed marketing decisions. Thanks to the availability of a ... Read More

With the rise of search engines such as Google, it is becoming increasingly important to determine how consumers use these tools to find products, services, or information. Companies that understand their customers’ search behaviour can better tailor the content of their websites and pay for the right advertising on search engines. To help firms make best ... Read More

Moment marketing is a rich new area of contextual advertising that entails the ability to synchronize online advertising (e.g., sponsored search) in real time with relevant offline events such as TV ads. Although 81% of surveyed digital marketers have launched moment marketing campaigns mostly using TV advertising as trigger events, very little is known ... Read More

We develop a flexible content-based search model that links the content preferences of search engine users to query search volume and click-through rates. Content preferences are defined over latent topics that describe the content of search queries and search result descriptions. Moreover, our model allows content preferences to vary systematically based on ... Read More