As Pinterest continues to build out its AI-powered advertising platform for
product discovery and heightened user engagement, the Microsoft-owned social-media company is also focused on boosting the relevance of its ad delivery system via a real-time context.
In a recent
post on Medium, the Pinterest Engineering
team describes how the company is working to enhance its candidate generator, which measures users’ offsite conversion history to inform ad delivery, by embedding more contextual information
surrounding users’ real-time browsing behavior.
“A key limitation of the initial sequential model was its lack of online context information,” the team writes. “The user
embeddings were inferred offline purely from historical offsite behavior, meaning that at the moment an ad was served, the model had no knowledge of what the user was currently browsing on
Pinterest.”
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Pinterest engineers call this a “crucial drawback” for Related Pins and Search intent signals, as less than 1% of impressions on Related Pins were attributed to
the candidate generator.
The lack of real-time contextual signals has led to the development of Pinterest’s new “Contextual Sequential Two Tower Model,” which aims to incorporate
real-time, online context by integrating a secondary feed of what users are currently searching for.
To improve ad relevance, the new system evaluates additional input on related pins while
simultaneously considering purchase history.
After updating the model, Pinterest engineers conducted an offline evaluation, reporting that the new model delivered a 3x to 10x increase in ad
relevance per user compared to the previous model. The median relevance of the candidates rose by 275-300%
Bringing enhanced relevance per user to its ad-delivery system is likely to
complement the capabilities of Pinterest’s AI-powered advertising platform.
“Every search, click and save gives our AI more signal about who a user is and what they care about which
allows us to deliver more relevant and personalized experiences across the platform,” CEO Bill Ready stated during a recent earnings call. “Higher relevance drives deeper
engagement.”
