Keyword Targeting Optimization in Sponsored Search Advertising: Combining Selection and Matching

In sponsored search advertising (SSA), advertisers need to select keywords and determine matching types for selected keywords simultaneously, i.e., keyword targeting. An optimal keyword targeting strategy guarantees reaching the right population effectively. This paper aims to address the keyword targeting problem, which is a challenging task because of the incomplete information of historical advertising performance indices and the high uncertainty in SSA environments. First, we construct a data distribution estimation model and apply a Markov Chain Monte Carlo method to make inference about unobserved indices (i.e., impression and click-through rate) over three keyword matching types (i.e., broad, phrase and exact). Second, we formulate a stochastic keyword targeting model (BB-KSM) combining operations of keyword selection and keyword matching to maximize the expected profit under the chance constraint of the budget, and develop a branch-and-bound algorithm incorporating a stochastic simulation process for our keyword targeting model. Finally, based on a realworld dataset collected from field reports and logs of past SSA campaigns, computational experiments are conducted to evaluate the performance of our keyword targeting strategy. Experimental results show that, (a) BB-KSM outperforms seven baselines in terms of profit; (b) BB-KSM shows its superiority as the budget increases, especially in situations with more keywords and keyword combinations; (c) the proposed data distribution estimation approach can effectively address the problem of incomplete performance indices over the three matching types and in turn significantly promotes the performance of keyword targeting decisions. This research makes important contributions to the SSA literature and the results offer critical insights into keyword management for SSA advertisers.Comment: 38 pages, 4 figures, 5 table

Demystifying Advertising Campaign Bid Recommendation: A Constraint target CPA Goal Optimization

In cost-per-click (CPC) or cost-per-impression (CPM) advertising campaigns, advertisers always run the risk of spending the budget without getting enough conversions. Moreover, the bidding on advertising inventory has few connections with propensity one that can reach to target cost-per-acquisition (tCPA) goals. To address this problem, this paper presents a bid optimization scenario to achieve the desired tCPA goals for advertisers. In particular, we build the optimization engine to make a decision by solving the rigorously formalized constrained optimization problem, which leverages the bid landscape model learned from rich historical auction data using non-parametric learning. The proposed model can naturally recommend the bid that meets the advertisers' expectations by making inference over advertisers' historical auction behaviors, which essentially deals with the data challenges commonly faced by bid landscape modeling: incomplete logs in auctions, and uncertainty due to the variation and fluctuations in advertising bidding behaviors. The bid optimization model outperforms the baseline methods on real-world campaigns, and has been applied into a wide range of scenarios for performance improvement and revenue liftup

Supply Side Optimisation in Online Display Advertising

On the Internet there are publishers (the supply side) who provide free contents (e.g., news) and services (e.g., email) to attract users. Publishers get paid by selling ad displaying opportunities (i.e., impressions) to advertisers. Advertisers then sell products to users who are converted by ads. Better supply side revenue allows more free content and services to be created, thus, benefiting the entire online advertising ecosystem. This thesis addresses several optimisation problems for the supply side. When a publisher creates an ad-supported website, he needs to decide the percentage of ads first. The thesis reports a large-scale empirical study of Internet ad density over past seven years, then presents a model that includes many factors, especially the competition among similar publishers, and gives an optimal dynamic ad density that generates the maximum revenue over time. This study also unveils the tragedy of the commons in online advertising where users' attention has been overgrazed which results in a global sub-optimum. After deciding the ad density, the publisher retrieves ads from various sources, including contracts, ad networks, and ad exchanges. This forms an exploration-exploitation problem when ad sources are typically unknown before trail. This problem is modelled using Partially Observable Markov Decision Process (POMDP), and the exploration efficiency is increased by utilising the correlation of ads. The proposed method reports 23.4% better than the best performing baseline in the real-world data based experiments. Since some ad networks allow (or expect) an input of keywords, the thesis also presents an adaptive keyword extraction system using BM25F algorithm and the multi-armed bandits model. This system has been tested by a domain service provider in crowdsourcing based experiments. If the publisher selects a Real-Time Bidding (RTB) ad source, he can use reserve price to manipulate auctions for better payoff. This thesis proposes a simplified game model that considers the competition between seller and buyer to be one-shot instead of repeated and gives heuristics that can be easily implemented. The model has been evaluated in a production environment and reported 12.3% average increase of revenue. The documentation of a prototype system for reserve price optimisation is also presented in the appendix of the thesis

Dynamic Ad Allocation: Bandits with Budgets

We consider an application of multi-armed bandits to internet advertising (specifically, to dynamic ad allocation in the pay-per-click model, with uncertainty on the click probabilities). We focus on an important practical issue that advertisers are constrained in how much money they can spend on their ad campaigns. This issue has not been considered in the prior work on bandit-based approaches for ad allocation, to the best of our knowledge. We define a simple, stylized model where an algorithm picks one ad to display in each round, and each ad has a \emph{budget}: the maximal amount of money that can be spent on this ad. This model admits a natural variant of UCB1, a well-known algorithm for multi-armed bandits with stochastic rewards. We derive strong provable guarantees for this algorithm

Keyword Segmentation, Campaign Organization, and Budget Allocation in Sponsored Search Advertising

Sponsored search advertising, where search providers allow advertisers to participate in a real-time auction and compete for ad slots on search engine results pages (SERPs), is currently one of the most popular advertising channels by marketers. Some domains such as Amazon.com allocate in millions of dollars a month to their sponsored search campaigns. Considering the amount of money allocated to sponsored search as well as the dynamic nature of keyword advertising process, the campaign budget planning decision is a non-trivial task for advertisers. Budget constrained advertisers must consider a number of factors when deciding how to organize campaigns, how much budget to allocate to them, and which keywords to bid on. Specifically, they must decide how to spend budget across planning horizons, markets, campaigns, and ad groups. In this thesis, I develop a simulation model that integrates the issues of keyword segmentation, campaign organization, and budget allocation in order to characterize different budget allocation strategies and understand their implications on search advertising performance. Using the buying funnel model as the basis of keyword segmentation and campaign organization, I examine several budget allocation strategies (i.e., search Volume-based, Cost-based, and Clicks-based) and evaluate their performance implications for firms that may pursue different marketing objectives based on industry and or product/service offerings. I evaluate the simulation model using four fortune 500 companies as cases and their keyword advertising data obtained from Spyfu.com. The results and statistical analysis shows significant improvements in budget utilization using the above-mentioned allocation strategies over a Baseline strategy commonly used in practice. The study offers a unique insight into the budget allocation problem in sponsored search advertising by leveraging a theoretical framework for keyword segmentation, campaign management, and performance evaluation. It also provides insights for advertiser on operational issues such as keyword categorization and campaign organization and prioritization for improved performance. The proposed simulation model also contributes a valid experimental environment to test further decision scenarios, theoretical frameworks, and campaign allocation strategies in sponsored search advertising

AdCraft: An Advanced Reinforcement Learning Benchmark Environment for Search Engine Marketing Optimization

We introduce AdCraft, a novel benchmark environment for the Reinforcement Learning (RL) community distinguished by its stochastic and non-stationary properties. The environment simulates bidding and budgeting dynamics within Search Engine Marketing (SEM), a digital marketing technique utilizing paid advertising to enhance the visibility of websites on search engine results pages (SERPs). The performance of SEM advertisement campaigns depends on several factors, including keyword selection, ad design, bid management, budget adjustments, and performance monitoring. Deep RL recently emerged as a potential strategy to optimize campaign profitability within the complex and dynamic landscape of SEM but it requires substantial data, which may be costly or infeasible to acquire in practice. Our customizable environment enables practitioners to assess and enhance the robustness of RL algorithms pertinent to SEM bid and budget management without such costs. Through a series of experiments within the environment, we demonstrate the challenges imposed by sparsity and non-stationarity on agent convergence and performance. We hope these challenges further encourage discourse and development around effective strategies for managing real-world uncertainties

An empirical study of reserve price optimisation in real-time bidding

ABSTRACT In this paper, we report the first empirical study and live test of the reserve price optimisation problem in the context of Real-Time Bidding (RTB) display advertising from an operational environment. A reserve price is the minimum that the auctioneer would accept from bidders in auctions, and in a second price auction it could potentially uplift the auctioneer's revenue by charging winners the reserve price instead of the second highest bids. As such it has been used for sponsored search and been well studied in that context. However, comparing with sponsored search and contextual advertising, this problem in the RTB context is less understood yet more critical for publishers because 1) bidders have to submit a bid for each individual impression, which mostly is associated with user data that is subject to change over time. This, coupled with practical constraints such as the budget, campaigns' life time, etc. makes the theoretical result from optimal auction theory not necessarily applicable and a further empirical study is required to confirm its optimality from the real-world system; 2) in RTB an advertiser is facing nearly unlimited supply and the auction is almost done in "last second", which encourages spending less on the high cost ad placements. This could imply the loss of bid volume over time if a correct reserve price is not in place. In this paper we empirically examine several commonly adopted algorithms for setting up a reserve price. We report our results of a large scale online experiment in a production platform. The results suggest the our proposed game theory based OneShot algorithm performed the best and the superiority is significant in most cases

Essays in Online Advertising

The last several years have seen a dramatic increase in the amount of time and money consumers spend online. As a consequence, the Internet has become an important channel that firms can use to reach out and connect to consumers which has lead to the emergence of online advertising.Given the scale and novelty of online advertising, there is a growing need to understand how consumers respond to online ads and how firms should advertise using this medium. In my dissertation, I study different aspects of sponsored search and display ads which constitute the bulk of online advertising. In the first essay, I focus on the issues related to the use of aggregate data in sponsored search. I demonstrate that models commonly used in sponsored search research suffer from aggregation bias and present the implications of this aggregation bias. In the second essay, I focus on the advertiser\u27s problem of bidding optimally in sponsored search auctions. In the third essay, I study the interactions between various forms of online advertising like banner ads, display ads and sponsored search ads and address the problem of attribution

Beyond the Last Touch: Attribution in Online Advertising

Online advertisers often utilize multiple publishers to deliver ads to multi-homing consumers. These ads often generate externalities and their exposure is uncertain, which impacts advertising effectiveness across publishers. We analytically analyze the inefficiencies created by externalities and uncertainty when information is symmetric between advertisers and publishers, in contrast to most previous research that assumes information asymmetry. Although these inefficiencies cannot be resolved through publisher side actions, attribution methods that measure the campaign uncertainty can serve as an alternative solution to help advertisers adjust their strategies. Attribution creates a virtual competition between publishers, resulting in a team compensation problem. The equilibrium may potentially increase the aggressiveness of advertiser bidding leading to increased advertiser profits. The popular last-touch method is shown to over-incentivize ad exposures, often resulting in lowering advertiser profits. The Shapley value achieves an increase in profits compared to last-touch. Popular publishers and those that appear early in the conversion funnel benefit the most from advertisers using last-touch attribution. The increase in advertiser profits come at the expense of total publisher profits and often results in decreased ad allocation efficiency. We also find that the prices paid in the market will decrease when more sophisticated attribution methods are adopted

Shelter Sense Volume 08, Number 06

The animal slave trade: suffering on the road to research (Debbie Reed) School program discusses dog bites Advice on ways to inform and influence local officials (Sandy Rowland) Shedd\u27s tumblers spread word of HSUS HSUS Annual Conference: A life-style for the 80\u27s Free leashes promote law Fast action brings lost pets home! Computer survey results (Randall Lockwood, Ph.D.) Just Wright: National organizations pledge cooperation (Phyllis Wright