Today, billions of display ad impressions are purchased on a daily basis through a public auction hosted by real time bidding (RTB) exchanges. A decision has to be made for advertisers to submit a bid for each selected RTB ad request in milliseconds. Restricted by the budget, the goal is to buy a set of ad impressions to reach as many targeted users as possible. A desired action (conversion), advertiser specific, includes purchasing a product, filling out a form, signing up for emails, etc. In addition, advertisers typically prefer to spend their budget smoothly over the time in order to reach a wider range of audience accessible throughout a day and have a sustainable impact. However, since the conversions occur rarely and the occurrence feedback is normally delayed, it is very challenging to achieve both budget and performance goals at the same time. In this paper, we present an online approach to the smooth budget delivery while optimizing for the conversion performance. Our algorithm tries to select high quality impressions and adjust the bid price based on the prior performance distribution in an adaptive manner by distributing the budget optimally across time. Our experimental results from real advertising campaigns demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed approach.
Zhou @cite_10 modeled the budget constrained bidding optimization problem as an online knapsack problem. They proposed a simple strategy to select high quality ad requests based on an exponential function with respect to the budget period. As time goes by, the proposed algorithm will select higher and higher quality of ad requests. However, this approach has an underlying assumption of unlimited supply; i.e., there are infinite amount of ad requests in the RTB environment. This assumption is impractical especially for those campaigns with strict audience targeting constraints.
@cite_10
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We consider the budget-constrained bidding optimization problem for sponsored search auctions, and model it as an online (multiple-choice) knapsack problem. We design both deterministic and randomized algorithms for the online (multiple-choice) knapsack problems achieving a provably optimal competitive ratio. This translates back to fully automatic bidding strategies maximizing either profit or revenue for the budget-constrained advertiser. Our bidding strategy for revenue maximization is oblivious (i.e., without knowledge) of other bidders' prices and or click-through-rates for those positions. We evaluate our bidding algorithms using both synthetic data and real bidding data gathered manually, and also discuss a sniping heuristic that strictly improves bidding performance. With sniping and parameter tuning enabled, our bidding algorithms can achieve a performance ratio above 90 against the optimum by the omniscient bidder.