5,800 research outputs found
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.
Lift-Based Bidding in Ad Selection
Real-time bidding (RTB) has become one of the largest online advertising
markets in the world. Today the bid price per ad impression is typically
decided by the expected value of how it can lead to a desired action event
(e.g., registering an account or placing a purchase order) to the advertiser.
However, this industry standard approach to decide the bid price does not
consider the actual effect of the ad shown to the user, which should be
measured based on the performance lift among users who have been or have not
been exposed to a certain treatment of ads. In this paper, we propose a new
bidding strategy and prove that if the bid price is decided based on the
performance lift rather than absolute performance value, advertisers can
actually gain more action events. We describe the modeling methodology to
predict the performance lift and demonstrate the actual performance gain
through blind A/B test with real ad campaigns in an industry-leading
Demand-Side Platform (DSP). We also discuss the relationship between
attribution models and bidding strategies. We prove that, to move the DSPs to
bid based on performance lift, they should be rewarded according to the
relative performance lift they contribute.Comment: AAAI 201
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
Analysis of online advertisement performance using Markov chains
The measurement and performance analysis of online marketing is far from simple as it is usually conducted in multiple channels which results depend on each other. The results of the performance analysis can vary drastically depending on the attribution model used. An online marketing attribution analysis is needed to make better decisions on where to allocate marketing budgets. This thesis aims to provide a framework for more optimal budget alloca- tion by conducting a data-driven attribution model analysis to the case company’s dataset and comparing the results with the de-facto last-click attribution model’s results. The frame- work is currently utilized in the case company to improve the online marketing budget allo- cation and to gain better understanding of the marketing efforts.
The thesis begins with literature review to online marketing, measurement techniques and most used attribution modeling models in the industry. The Markov’s attribution model was chosen to the analysis because of its promising results in other research and the ease of implementation with the dataset available. The dataset used in the analysis contains 582 111 user paths collected during 7 months period from the case company’s website. The analysis was conducted using R programming language and open source ChannelAttribution package that includes tools for fitting a k-order Markovian model in to a dataset and analyzing the results and the model’s reliability. The performance of the attribution model was analyzed using a ROC curve to evaluate the prediction accuracy of the model.
The results of the research indicate the Markov’s model gives more reliable results on where to allocate the marketing budget than then last-click attribution model that is widely used in the industry. Overall the objectives of this thesis were achieved, and this study pro- vides a solid framework for marketing managers to analyze their marketing efforts and real- locate their marketing budgets in more optimal way. However, more research is needed to improve the prediction accuracy of the model and to improve the understanding of the effects of budget reallocation
Profit maximization through budget allocation in display advertising
Online display advertising provides advertisers a unique opportunity to calculate real-time return on investment for advertising campaigns. Based on the target audiences, each advertising campaign is divided into sub campaigns, called ad sets, which all have their individual returns. Consequently, the advertiser faces an optimization problem of how to allocate the advertising budget across ad sets so that the total return on investment is maximized. Performance of each ad set is unknown to the advertiser beforehand. Thus the advertiser risks choosing a suboptimal ad set if allocating budget to the one assumed to be the optimal. On the other hand, the advertiser wastes money when exploring the returns and not allocating budget to the optimal ad set.
This exploration vs. exploitation dilemma is known from so called multi-armed bandit problem. Standard multi-armed bandit problem consists of a gambler and multiple gambling-slot machines i.e. bandits. The gambler needs to balance between exploring which of the bandits has the highest rewards and simultaneously maximising the reward by playing the bandit having the highest return. I formalize the budget allocation problem faced by the online advertiser as a batched bandit problem where the bandits have to be played in batches instead of one by one. Based on the previous literature, I propose several allocation policies to solve the budget allocation problem. In addition, I use an extensive real world dataset from over 200 Facebook advertising campaigns to test the performance impact of different allocation policies.
My empirical results give evidence that the return on investment of online advertising campaigns can be improved by dynamically allocating budget. So called greedy algorithms, allocating more of the budget to the ad set having the best historical average, seem to perform notable well. I show that the performance can further be improved by dynamically decreasing the exploration budget by time. Another well performing policy is Thompson sampling which allocates budget by sampling return estimates from a prior distribution formed based on historical returns. Upper confidence and probability policies, often proposed in the machine learning literature, don’t seem to apply that well to the real world resource allocation problem.
I also contribute to the previous literature by providing evidence that the advertiser should base the budget allocation on observations of the real revenue generating event (e.g. product purchase) instead of using observations of more general events (e.g. clicks of ads). In addition, my research gives evidence that the performance of the allocation policies is dependent on the number of observations the policy has to make the decision based on. This may be an issue in real world applications if the number of available observations is scarce. I believe this issue is not unique to display advertising and consequently propose a future research topic of developing more robust batched bandit algorithms for resource allocation decisions where the rate of return is small
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
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