Inefficiencies in Digital Advertising Markets

Digital advertising markets are growing and attracting increased scrutiny. This article explores four market inefficiencies that remain poorly understood: ad effect measurement, frictions between and within advertising channel members, ad blocking, and ad fraud. Although these topics are not unique to digital advertising, each manifests in unique ways in markets for digital ads. The authors identify relevant findings in the academic literature, recent developments in practice, and promising topics for future research

Multi-Touch Attribution Based Budget Allocation in Online Advertising

Budget allocation in online advertising deals with distributing the campaign (insertion order) level budgets to different sub-campaigns which employ different targeting criteria and may perform differently in terms of return-on-investment (ROI). In this paper, we present the efforts at Turn on how to best allocate campaign budget so that the advertiser or campaign-level ROI is maximized. To do this, it is crucial to be able to correctly determine the performance of sub-campaigns. This determination is highly related to the action-attribution problem, i.e. to be able to find out the set of ads, and hence the sub-campaigns that provided them to a user, that an action should be attributed to. For this purpose, we employ both last-touch (last ad gets all credit) and multi-touch (many ads share the credit) attribution methodologies. We present the algorithms deployed at Turn for the attribution problem, as well as their parallel implementation on the large advertiser performance datasets. We conclude the paper with our empirical comparison of last-touch and multi-touch attribution-based budget allocation in a real online advertising setting.Comment: This paper has been published in ADKDD 2014, August 24, New York City, New York, U.S.

Media mix modeling: a case study on optimizing television and digital media spend for a retailer

Project Work presented as the partial requirement for obtaining a Master's degree in Information Management, specialization in Marketing IntelligenceRetailers invest most of their advertising budget in traditional channels, namely Television, even though the percentage of budget allocated towards digital media has been increasing. Since the largest part of sales still happen in physical stores, marketers face the challenge of optimizing their media mix to maximize revenue. To address this challenge, media mix models were developed using the traditional modeling approach, based on linear regressions, with data from a retailer’s advertising campaign, specifically the online and offline investments per channel and online conversion metrics. The models were influenced by the selection bias regarding funnel effects, which was exacerbated by the use of the last-touch attribution model that tends to disproportionately skew marketer investment away from higher funnel channels to lower-funnel. Nonetheless, results from the models suggest that online channels were more effective in explaining the variance of the number of participations, which were a proxy to sales. To managers, this thesis highlights that there are factors specific to their own campaigns that influence the media mix models, which they must consider and, if possible, control for. One factor is the selection biases, such as ad targeting that may arise from using the paid search channel or remarketing tactics, seasonality or the purchase funnel effects bias that undermines the contribution of higher-funnel channels like TV, which generates awareness in the target audience. Therefore, companies should assess which of these biases might have a bigger influence on their results and design their models accordingly. Data limitations are the most common constraint for marketing mix modeling. In this case, we did not have access to sales and media spend historical data. Therefore, it was not possible to understand what the uplift in sales caused by the promotion was, as well as to verify the impact of the promotion on items that were eligible to participate in the promotion, versus the items that were not. Also, we were not able to reduce the bias from the paid search channel because we lacked the search query data necessary to control for it and improve the accuracy of the models. Moreover, this project is not the ultimate solution for the “company’s” marketing measurement challenges but rather informs its next initiatives. It describes the state of the art in marketing mix modeling, reveals the limitations of the models developed and suggests ways to improve future models. In turn, this is expected to provide more accurate marketing measurement, and as a result, a media budget allocation that improves business performance

Applications of Multi-Touch Attribution Modelling

The Digital landscape has evolved vastly since the early 2000s in terms of analytical tools and tracking software. With the Rise of 4G to 5G, smartphones have become the norm when surfing through the web. New problems arise in terms of measuring business performance like Cross-Channel and Multi-Channel Attribution. Companies are selling more products and services on their Websites and marketplaces than ever before. Brands must become digital natives and translate all of their offline business into the internet. When Brands invest in multiple marketing channels and those channels mix up in the Customer Journey, new measurement problems arise. Based on the current standard methodology on web analytics, companies track their conversions (signups, subscriptions, orders) and assign each channel’s attribution using simple heuristics. In other words, simple decision models. It has been vastly studied that single-touch attribution does not perform well under complex business scenarios like those observed nowadays. Attribution modeling has been a hot topic in the last decade due to the rise of Machine Learning and data mining. Nowadays, there are two current trends. The problem can be analyzed from a Machine Learning standpoint, understanding that it looks like a Classification problem with a Binary Outcome (0/1). On the other hand, Shapley Values and Game theory also adapt efficiently to the question, where every player gets credit for contributing to conversions. Given that there are different state-of-the-art models which perform better than others and that multiple papers are trying to improve robustness, predictive accuracy, interpretability, this thesis will focus primarily on applications and interpretability of the model. Most of today’s Marketing Managers and teams find it extremely hard to use and apply these types of models due to the complexity of the topic and black-box models, which have little to no interpretability. The idea is to encourage more companies into the MTA landscape to test their models and optimize them specifically for their industry in this work. Additionally, to my knowledge, there is no research on Markov Chains applied to Subscription Business Models that are substantially different from E-Commerce Customer Journeys.Por motivos relacionados con los derechos de autor este documento solo puede ser consultado en la Biblioteca Di Tella. Para reservar una cita podés ponerte en contacto con [email protected]. Si sos el autor de esta tesis y querés autorizar su publicación en este repositorio, podés ponerte en contacto con [email protected]

Atrio – attribution model orchestrator

Project Work presented as the partial requirement for obtaining a Master's degree in Information Management, specialization in Information Systems and Technologies ManagementIn Digital Advertising, Attribution Modelling is used to assess the contribution of media touchpoints to the campaign outcome, by analyzing each person’s sequence of contacts and interactions with these touchpoints, designated as the Consumer Journey. The ability to acquire, model and analyze campaign data to derive meaningful insights, usually involves proprietary tools, provided by campaign delivery platforms. ATRIO is proposed as an open-sourced framework for Attribution Modelling, orchestrating the data pipeline through transformation, integration, and delivery, to provide Attribution Modelling capabilities for digital media agencies with proprietary data, who need control over the Attribution Modeling process. From a tabular dataset, ATRIO can produce simple heuristics such as last-click analysis, but also data-driven attribution models, based on Shapley’s Game Theory and Markov Chains. As opposed to the black-boxed tools offered by campaign delivery platforms, which are focused in their media channels performance, ATRIO empowers digital media agencies to customize and apply different Attribution Models for each campaign, providing an agnostic, open-source based, holistic and multi-channel analysis

Digital Marketing Attribution: Understanding the User Path

This article belongs to the Section Computer Science & EngineeringDigital marketing is a profitable business generating annual revenue over USD 200B and an inter-annual growth over 20%. The definition of efficient marketing investment strategies across different types of channels and campaigns is a key task in digital marketing. Attribution models are an instrument used to assess the return of investment of different channels and campaigns so that they can assist in the decision-making process. A new generation of more powerful data-driven attribution models has irrupted in the market in the last years. Unfortunately, its adoption is slower than expected. One of the main reasons is that the industry lacks a proper understanding of these models and how to configure them. To solve this issue, in this paper, we present an empirical study to better understand the key properties of user-paths and their impact on attribution models. Our analysis is based on a large-scale dataset including more than 95M user-paths from real advertising campaigns of an international hoteling group. The main contribution of the paper is a set of recommendation to build accurate, interpretable and computationally efficient attribution models such as: (i) the use of linear regression, an interpretable machine learning algorithm, to build accurate attribution models; (ii) user-paths including around 12 events are enough to produce accurate models; (iii) the recency of events considered in the user-paths is important for the accuracy of the model.The research leading to these results has received funding from: the European Union’s Horizon 2020 innovation action programme under grant agreement No 786741 (SMOOTH project) and the gran agreement No 871370 (PIMCITY project); the Ministerio de Economía, Industria y Competitividad, Spain, and the European Social Fund(EU), under the Ramón y Cajal programme (grant RyC-2015-17732);the Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación under the project ACHILLES (Grant PID2019-104207RB-I00); the Community of Madrid synergic project EMPATIA-CM (Grant Y2018/TCS-5046)