Display advertising normally charges advertisers for every single ad impression. Specifically, if an ad in a webpage has been loaded in the browser, an ad impression is counted. However, due to the position and size of the ad slot, lots of ads are actually not viewed but still measured as impressions and charged. These fraud ad impressions indeed undermine the efficacy of display advertising. A perfect ad impression viewability measurement should match what the user has really viewed with a short memory. In this paper, we conduct extensive investigations on display ad impression viewability measurements on dimensions of ad creative displayed pixel percentage and exposure time to find which measurement provides the most accurate ad impression counting. The empirical results show that the most accurate measurement counts one ad impression if more than 75 of the ad creative pixels have been exposed for at least 2 continuous seconds.
Since the origin of online advertising, the researchers have been seeking a way to answer whether or not the user has viewed an ad in one webpage. In @cite_7 , the relationship between the ad creative animation and users' recognition were studied but the authors found such relationship was not significant. The authors in @cite_5 @cite_3 leveraged the eye-tracking techniques to study the users' attention area on the screen and check how likely the user truly viewed a particular ad. Different users and webpages had much different high attention areas @cite_3 . However, such eye-tracking techniques are impractical to be used in the production. The most practical and straightforward method is to define the pixel percentage and exposure time as the thresholds of measuring a viewed impression across all the webpages and users. In 2013, Google announced that the advertisers were charged only for the viewed ad impressions, where an ad was considered as viewed only if the pixel percentage was no less than 50
@cite_5 @cite_3 @cite_7
2019658628 2071488943 2885929946 1992556596
An understanding of how people allocate their visual attention when viewing Web pages is very important for Web authors, interface designers, advertisers and others. Such knowledge opens the door to a variety of innovations, ranging from improved Web page design to the creation of compact, yet recognizable, visual representations of long pages. We present an eye-tracking study in which 20 users viewed 361 Web pages while engaged in information foraging and page recognition tasks. From this data, we describe general location-based characteristics of visual attention for Web pages dependent on different tasks and demographics, and generate a model for predicting the visual attention that individual page elements may receive. Finally, we introduce the concept of fixation impact, a new method for mapping gaze data to visual scenes that is motivated by findings in vision research. We consider the problem of estimating occurrence rates of rare eventsfor extremely sparse data, using pre-existing hierarchies to perform inference at multiple resolutions. In particular, we focus on the problem of estimating click rates for (webpage, advertisement) pairs (called impressions) where both the pages and the ads are classified into hierarchies that capture broad contextual information at different levels of granularity. Typically the click rates are low and the coverage of the hierarchies is sparse. To overcome these difficulties we devise a sampling method whereby we analyze aspecially chosen sample of pages in the training set, and then estimate click rates using a two-stage model. The first stage imputes the number of (webpage, ad) pairs at all resolutions of the hierarchy to adjust for the sampling bias. The second stage estimates clickrates at all resolutions after incorporating correlations among sibling nodes through a tree-structured Markov model. Both models are scalable and suited to large scale data mining applications. On a real-world dataset consisting of 1 2 billion impressions, we demonstrate that even with 95 negative (non-clicked) events in the training set, our method can effectively discriminate extremely rare events in terms of their click propensity. In online advertising, the Internet users may be exposed to a sequence of different ad campaigns, i.e., display ads, search, or referrals from multiple channels, before led up to any final sales conversion and transaction. For both campaigners and publishers, it is fundamentally critical to estimate the contribution from ad campaign touch-points during the customer journey (conversion funnel) and assign the right credit to the right ad exposure accordingly. However, the existing research on the multi-touch attribution problem lacks a principled way of utilizing the users' pre-conversion actions (i.e., clicks), and quite often fails to model the sequential patterns among the touch points from a user's behavior data. To make it worse, the current industry practice is merely employing a set of arbitrary rules as the attribution model, e.g., the popular last-touch model assigns 100 credit to the final touch-point regardless of actual attributions. In this paper, we propose a Dual-attention Recurrent Neural Network (DARNN) for the multi-touch attribution problem. It learns the attribution values through an attention mechanism directly from the conversion estimation objective. To achieve this, we utilize sequence-to-sequence prediction for user clicks, and combine both post-view and post-click attribution patterns together for the final conversion estimation. To quantitatively benchmark attribution models, we also propose a novel yet practical attribution evaluation scheme through the proxy of budget allocation (under the estimated attributions) over ad channels. The experimental results on two real datasets demonstrate the significant performance gains of our attribution model against the state of the art. Online advertising has become a key source of revenue for both web search engines and online publishers. For them, the ability of allocating right ads to right webpages is critical because any mismatched ads would not only harm web users' satisfactions but also lower the ad income. In this paper, we study how online publishers could optimally select ads to maximize their ad incomes over time. The conventional offline, content-based matching between webpages and ads is a fine start but cannot solve the problem completely because good matching does not necessarily lead to good payoff. Moreover, with the limited display impressions, we need to balance the need of selecting ads to learn true ad payoffs (exploration) with that of allocating ads to generate high immediate payoffs based on the current belief (exploitation). In this paper, we address the problem by employing Partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs) and discuss how to utilize the correlation of ads to improve the efficiency of the exploration and increase ad incomes in a long run. Our mathematical derivation shows that the belief states of correlated ads can be naturally updated using a formula similar to collaborative filtering. To test our model, a real world ad dataset from a major search engine is collected and categorized. Experimenting over the data, we provide an analyse of the effect of the underlying parameters, and demonstrate that our algorithms significantly outperform other strong baselines.