CTR-Driven Ad Text Generation via Online Feedback Preference Optimization

Abstract: Advertising text plays a critical role in determining click-through rates (CTR) in online advertising. LLMs offer significant efficiency advantages over manual ad text creation. However, LLM-generated ad texts do not guarantee higher CTR performance compared to human-crafted texts, revealing a gap between generation quality and online performance of ad texts. In this work, we propose a novel ad text generation method which optimizes for CTR through preference optimization from online feedback. Our approach adopts an innovative two-stage framework: (1) diverse ad text sampling via one-shot in-context learning, using retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) to provide exemplars with chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning; (2) CTR-driven preference optimization from online feedback, which weighs preference pairs according to their CTR gains and confidence levels. Through our method, the resulting model enables end-to-end generation of high-CTR ad texts. Extensive experiments have demonstrated the effectiveness of our method in both offline and online metrics. Notably, we have applied our method on a large-scale online shopping platform and achieved significant CTR improvements, showcasing its strong applicability and effectiveness in advertising systems.