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Adaptive bidding for display advertising

Published: 20 April 2009 Publication History

Abstract

Motivated by the emergence of auction-based marketplaces for display ads such as the Right Media Exchange, we study the design of a bidding agent that implements a display advertising campaign by bidding in such a marketplace. The bidding agent must acquire a given number of impressions with a given target spend, when the highest external bid in the marketplace is drawn from an unknown distribution P. The quantity and spend constraints arise from the fact that display ads are usually sold on a CPM basis. We consider both the full information setting, where the winning price in each auction is announced publicly, and the partially observable setting where only the winner obtains information about the distribution; these differ in the penalty incurred by the agent while attempting to learn the distribution. We provide algorithms for both settings, and prove performance guarantees using bounds on uniform closeness from statistics, and techniques from online learning. We experimentally evaluate these algorithms: both algorithms perform very well with respect to both target quantity and spend; further, our algorithm for the partially observable case performs nearly as well as that for the fully observable setting despite the higher penalty incurred during learning.

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  • (2025)Dynamic bidding strategy in online advertising: A rollout-tracking bid optimization methodologyAdvanced Engineering Informatics10.1016/j.aei.2024.10304664(103046)Online publication date: Mar-2025
  • (2024)Convexity in Real-time Bidding and Related ProblemsACM Transactions on Economics and Computation10.1145/365655212:2(1-27)Online publication date: 15-Apr-2024
  • (2024)Optimizing Real-Time Bidding Strategies: An Experimental Analysis of Reinforcement Learning and Machine Learning TechniquesProcedia Computer Science10.1016/j.procs.2024.04.191235(2017-2026)Online publication date: 2024
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cover image ACM Conferences
WWW '09: Proceedings of the 18th international conference on World wide web
April 2009
1280 pages
ISBN:9781605584874
DOI:10.1145/1526709

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 20 April 2009

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Author Tags

  1. adaptive bidding
  2. concentration bounds
  3. display advertising
  4. guaranteed delivery
  5. guess-then-double algorithms

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Overall Acceptance Rate 1,899 of 8,196 submissions, 23%

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  • (2025)Dynamic bidding strategy in online advertising: A rollout-tracking bid optimization methodologyAdvanced Engineering Informatics10.1016/j.aei.2024.10304664(103046)Online publication date: Mar-2025
  • (2024)Convexity in Real-time Bidding and Related ProblemsACM Transactions on Economics and Computation10.1145/365655212:2(1-27)Online publication date: 15-Apr-2024
  • (2024)Optimizing Real-Time Bidding Strategies: An Experimental Analysis of Reinforcement Learning and Machine Learning TechniquesProcedia Computer Science10.1016/j.procs.2024.04.191235(2017-2026)Online publication date: 2024
  • (2023)Receding Bid Optimization Method with Real-Time Feedback and Prediction for Sponsored Search Advertising on Taobao2023 42nd Chinese Control Conference (CCC)10.23919/CCC58697.2023.10240815(3476-3483)Online publication date: 24-Jul-2023
  • (2023)Optimizing Reserve Prices in Display Advertising AuctionsSSRN Electronic Journal10.2139/ssrn.4523022Online publication date: 2023
  • (2023)Adaptive RiskAware Bidding with Budget Constraint in Display AdvertisingACM SIGKDD Explorations Newsletter10.1145/3606274.360628125:1(73-82)Online publication date: 5-Jul-2023
  • (2023)Serving two masters? Optimizing mobile ad contracts with heterogeneous advertisersProduction and Operations Management10.1111/poms.1389032:2(618-636)Online publication date: 1-Feb-2023
  • (2022)An Actor-critic Reinforcement Learning Model for Optimal Bidding in Online Display AdvertisingProceedings of the 31st ACM International Conference on Information & Knowledge Management10.1145/3511808.3557064(3604-3613)Online publication date: 17-Oct-2022
  • (2021)Real-time Bidding for Time Constrained Impression Contracts in First and Second Price Auctions - Theory and AlgorithmsProceedings of the ACM on Measurement and Analysis of Computing Systems10.1145/34910495:3(1-37)Online publication date: 15-Dec-2021
  • (2021)Trends and patterns in digital marketing research: bibliometric analysisJournal of Marketing Analytics10.1057/s41270-021-00116-910:2(158-172)Online publication date: 12-Aug-2021
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