Feedback Control of Real-Time Display Advertising

Real-Time Bidding (RTB) is revolutionising display advertising by facilitating per-impression auctions to buy ad impressions as they are being generated. Being able to use impression-level data, such as user cookies, encourages user behaviour targeting, and hence has significantly improved the effectiveness of ad campaigns. However, a fundamental drawback of RTB is its instability because the bid decision is made per impression and there are enormous fluctuations in campaigns’ key performance indicators (KPIs). As such, advertisers face great difficulty in controlling their campaign performance against the associated costs. In this paper, we propose a feedback control mechanism for RTB which helps advertisers dynamically adjust the bids to effectively control the KPIs, e.g., the auction winning ratio and the effective cost per click. We further formulate an optimisation framework to show that the proposed feedback control mechanism also has the ability of optimising campaign pe...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2016
• Where: WSDM
• Authors: Weinan Zhang, Yifei Rong, Jun Wang, Tianchi Zhu, Xiaofan Wang
• Keywords: Data Mining, WSDM 2016