Consider an online ad campaign run by an advertiser. The ad serving companies that handle such campaigns record users' behavior that leads to impressions of campaign ads, as well as users' responses to such impressions. This is summarized and reported to the advertisers to help them evaluate the performance of their campaigns and make better budget allocation decisions. The most popular reporting statistics are the click-through rate and the conversion rate. While these are indicative of the effectiveness of an ad campaign, the advertisers often seek to understand more sophisticated long-term effects of their ads on the brand awareness and the user behavior that leads to the conversion, thus creating a need for the reporting measures that can capture both the duration and the frequency of the pathways to user conversions. In this paper, we propose an alternative data mining framework for analyzing user-level advertising data. In the aggregation step, we compress individual u...
Nikolay Archak, Vahab S. Mirrokni, S. Muthukrishna