Scalable Audience Reach Estimation in Real-time Online Advertising

Online advertising has been introduced as one of the most efficient methods of advertising throughout the recent years. Yet, advertisers are concerned about the efficiency of their online advertising campaigns and consequently, would like to restrict their ad impressions to certain websites and/or certain groups of audience. These restrictions, known as targeting criteria, limit the reachability for better performance. This trade-off between reachability and performance illustrates a need for a forecasting system that can quickly predict/estimate (with good accuracy) this trade-off. Designing such a system is challenging due to (a) the huge amount of data to process, and, (b) the need for fast and accurate estimates. In this paper, we propose a distributed fault tolerant system that can generate such estimates fast with good accuracy. The main idea is to keep a small representative sample in memory across multiple machines and formulate the forecasting problem as queries against the sample. The key challenge is to find the best strata across the past data, perform multivariate stratified sampling while ensuring fuzzy fall-back to cover the small minorities. Our results show a significant improvement over the uniform and simple stratified sampling strategies which are currently widely used in the industry

Overview of Turn Data Management Platform for Digital Advertising

This paper gives an overview of Turn Data Management Platform (DMP). We explain the purpose of this type of platforms, and show how it is positioned in the current digital advertising ecosystem. We also provide a detailed description of the key components in Turn DMP. These components cover the functions of (1) data ingestion and integration, (2) data warehousing and analytics, and (3) real-time data activation. For all components, we discuss the main technical and research challenges, as well as the alternative design choices. One of the main goals of this paper is to highlight the central role that data management is playing in shaping this fast growing multi-billion dollars industry. 1