1,533 research outputs found
Smart Pacing for Effective Online Ad Campaign Optimization
In targeted online advertising, advertisers look for maximizing campaign
performance under delivery constraint within budget schedule. Most of the
advertisers typically prefer to impose the delivery constraint to spend budget
smoothly over the time in order to reach a wider range of audiences and have a
sustainable impact. Since lots of impressions are traded through public
auctions for online advertising today, the liquidity makes price elasticity and
bid landscape between demand and supply change quite dynamically. Therefore, it
is challenging to perform smooth pacing control and maximize campaign
performance simultaneously. In this paper, we propose a smart pacing approach
in which the delivery pace of each campaign is learned from both offline and
online data to achieve smooth delivery and optimal performance goals. The
implementation of the proposed approach in a real DSP system is also presented.
Experimental evaluations on both real online ad campaigns and offline
simulations show that our approach can effectively improve campaign performance
and achieve delivery goals.Comment: KDD'15, August 10-13, 2015, Sydney, NSW, Australi
Real-Time Bidding by Reinforcement Learning in Display Advertising
The majority of online display ads are served through real-time bidding (RTB)
--- each ad display impression is auctioned off in real-time when it is just
being generated from a user visit. To place an ad automatically and optimally,
it is critical for advertisers to devise a learning algorithm to cleverly bid
an ad impression in real-time. Most previous works consider the bid decision as
a static optimization problem of either treating the value of each impression
independently or setting a bid price to each segment of ad volume. However, the
bidding for a given ad campaign would repeatedly happen during its life span
before the budget runs out. As such, each bid is strategically correlated by
the constrained budget and the overall effectiveness of the campaign (e.g., the
rewards from generated clicks), which is only observed after the campaign has
completed. Thus, it is of great interest to devise an optimal bidding strategy
sequentially so that the campaign budget can be dynamically allocated across
all the available impressions on the basis of both the immediate and future
rewards. In this paper, we formulate the bid decision process as a
reinforcement learning problem, where the state space is represented by the
auction information and the campaign's real-time parameters, while an action is
the bid price to set. By modeling the state transition via auction competition,
we build a Markov Decision Process framework for learning the optimal bidding
policy to optimize the advertising performance in the dynamic real-time bidding
environment. Furthermore, the scalability problem from the large real-world
auction volume and campaign budget is well handled by state value approximation
using neural networks.Comment: WSDM 201
Statistical Arbitrage Mining for Display Advertising
We study and formulate arbitrage in display advertising. Real-Time Bidding
(RTB) mimics stock spot exchanges and utilises computers to algorithmically buy
display ads per impression via a real-time auction. Despite the new automation,
the ad markets are still informationally inefficient due to the heavily
fragmented marketplaces. Two display impressions with similar or identical
effectiveness (e.g., measured by conversion or click-through rates for a
targeted audience) may sell for quite different prices at different market
segments or pricing schemes. In this paper, we propose a novel data mining
paradigm called Statistical Arbitrage Mining (SAM) focusing on mining and
exploiting price discrepancies between two pricing schemes. In essence, our
SAMer is a meta-bidder that hedges advertisers' risk between CPA (cost per
action)-based campaigns and CPM (cost per mille impressions)-based ad
inventories; it statistically assesses the potential profit and cost for an
incoming CPM bid request against a portfolio of CPA campaigns based on the
estimated conversion rate, bid landscape and other statistics learned from
historical data. In SAM, (i) functional optimisation is utilised to seek for
optimal bidding to maximise the expected arbitrage net profit, and (ii) a
portfolio-based risk management solution is leveraged to reallocate bid volume
and budget across the set of campaigns to make a risk and return trade-off. We
propose to jointly optimise both components in an EM fashion with high
efficiency to help the meta-bidder successfully catch the transient statistical
arbitrage opportunities in RTB. Both the offline experiments on a real-world
large-scale dataset and online A/B tests on a commercial platform demonstrate
the effectiveness of our proposed solution in exploiting arbitrage in various
model settings and market environments.Comment: In the proceedings of the 21st ACM SIGKDD international conference on
Knowledge discovery and data mining (KDD 2015
Off-Policy Evaluation of Probabilistic Identity Data in Lookalike Modeling
We evaluate the impact of probabilistically-constructed digital identity data
collected from Sep. to Dec. 2017 (approx.), in the context of
Lookalike-targeted campaigns. The backbone of this study is a large set of
probabilistically-constructed "identities", represented as small bags of
cookies and mobile ad identifiers with associated metadata, that are likely all
owned by the same underlying user. The identity data allows to generate
"identity-based", rather than "identifier-based", user models, giving a fuller
picture of the interests of the users underlying the identifiers. We employ
off-policy techniques to evaluate the potential of identity-powered lookalike
models without incurring the risk of allowing untested models to direct large
amounts of ad spend or the large cost of performing A/B tests. We add to
historical work on off-policy evaluation by noting a significant type of
"finite-sample bias" that occurs for studies combining modestly-sized datasets
and evaluation metrics involving rare events (e.g., conversions). We illustrate
this bias using a simulation study that later informs the handling of inverse
propensity weights in our analyses on real data. We demonstrate significant
lift in identity-powered lookalikes versus an identity-ignorant baseline: on
average ~70% lift in conversion rate. This rises to factors of ~(4-32)x for
identifiers having little data themselves, but that can be inferred to belong
to users with substantial data to aggregate across identifiers. This implies
that identity-powered user modeling is especially important in the context of
identifiers having very short lifespans (i.e., frequently churned cookies). Our
work motivates and informs the use of probabilistically-constructed identities
in marketing. It also deepens the canon of examples in which off-policy
learning has been employed to evaluate the complex systems of the internet
economy.Comment: Accepted by WSDM 201
Deep Landscape Forecasting for Real-time Bidding Advertising
The emergence of real-time auction in online advertising has drawn huge
attention of modeling the market competition, i.e., bid landscape forecasting.
The problem is formulated as to forecast the probability distribution of market
price for each ad auction. With the consideration of the censorship issue which
is caused by the second-price auction mechanism, many researchers have devoted
their efforts on bid landscape forecasting by incorporating survival analysis
from medical research field. However, most existing solutions mainly focus on
either counting-based statistics of the segmented sample clusters, or learning
a parameterized model based on some heuristic assumptions of distribution
forms. Moreover, they neither consider the sequential patterns of the feature
over the price space. In order to capture more sophisticated yet flexible
patterns at fine-grained level of the data, we propose a Deep Landscape
Forecasting (DLF) model which combines deep learning for probability
distribution forecasting and survival analysis for censorship handling.
Specifically, we utilize a recurrent neural network to flexibly model the
conditional winning probability w.r.t. each bid price. Then we conduct the bid
landscape forecasting through probability chain rule with strict mathematical
derivations. And, in an end-to-end manner, we optimize the model by minimizing
two negative likelihood losses with comprehensive motivations. Without any
specific assumption for the distribution form of bid landscape, our model shows
great advantages over previous works on fitting various sophisticated market
price distributions. In the experiments over two large-scale real-world
datasets, our model significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art solutions
under various metrics.Comment: KDD 2019. The reproducible code and dataset link is
https://github.com/rk2900/DL
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