Mid-flight Forecasting for CPA Lines in Online Advertising

For Verizon MediaDemand Side Platform(DSP), forecasting of ad campaign performance not only feeds key information to the optimization server to allow the system to operate on a high-performance mode, but also produces actionable insights to the advertisers. In this paper, the forecasting problem for CPA lines in the middle of the flight is investigated by taking the bidding mechanism into account. The proposed methodology generates relationships between various key performance metrics and optimization signals. It can also be used to estimate the sensitivity of ad campaign performance metrics to the adjustments of optimization signal, which is important to the design of a campaign management system. The relationship between advertiser spends and effective Cost Per Action(eCPA) is also characterized, which serves as a guidance for mid-flight line adjustment to the advertisers. Several practical issues in implementation, such as downsampling of the dataset, are also discussed in the paper. At last, the forecasting results are validated against actual deliveries and demonstrates promising accuracy.

An Efficient Deep Distribution Network for Bid Shading in First-Price Auctions

Since 2019, most ad exchanges and sell-side platforms (SSPs), in the online advertising industry, shifted from second to first price auctions. Due to the fundamental difference between these auctions, demand-side platforms (DSPs) have had to update their bidding strategies to avoid bidding unnecessarily high and hence overpaying. Bid shading was proposed to adjust the bid price intended for second-price auctions, in order to balance cost and winning probability in a first-price auction setup. In this study, we introduce a novel deep distribution network for optimal bidding in both open (non-censored) and closed (censored) online first-price auctions. Offline and online A/B testing results show that our algorithm outperforms previous state-of-art algorithms in terms of both surplus and effective cost per action (eCPX) metrics. Furthermore, the algorithm is optimized in run-time and has been deployed into VerizonMedia DSP as production algorithm, serving hundreds of billions of bid requests per day. Online A/B test shows that advertiser's ROI are improved by +2.4%, +2.4%, and +8.6% for impression based (CPM), click based (CPC), and conversion based (CPA) campaigns respectively.