Optimal Spend Rate Estimation and Pacing for Ad Campaigns with Budgets
Online ad platforms offer budget management tools for advertisers that aim to maximize the number of conversions given a budget constraint. As the volume of impressions, conversion rates and prices vary over time, these budget management systems learn a spend plan (to find the optimal distribution of budget over time) and run a pacing algorithm which follows the spend plan. This paper considers two models for impressions and competition that varies with time: a) an episodic model which exhibits stationarity in each episode, but each episode can be arbitrarily different from the next, and b) a model where the distributions of prices and values change slowly over time. We present the first learning theoretic guarantees on both the accuracy of spend plans and the resulting end-to-end budget management system. We present four main results: 1) for the episodic setting we give sample complexity bounds for the spend rate prediction problem: given $n$ samples from each episode, with high probability we have $|\widehat{\rho}_e - \rho_e| \leq \tilde{O}(\frac{1}{n^{1/3}})$ where $\rho_e$ is the optimal spend rate for the episode, $\widehat{\rho}_e$ is the estimate from our algorithm, 2) we extend the algorithm of Balseiro and Gur (2017) to operate on varying, approximate spend rates and show that the resulting combined system of optimal spend rate estimation and online pacing algorithm for episodic settings has regret that vanishes in number of historic samples $n$ and the number of rounds $T$, 3) for non-episodic but slowly-changing distributions we show that the same approach approximates the optimal bidding strategy up to a factor dependent on the rate-of-change of the distributions and 4) we provide experiments showing that our algorithm outperforms both static spend plans and non-pacing across a wide variety of settings.
Code (0)
등록된 구현이 없습니다.
Tasks
ManagementSimilar Papers 제목 키워드 기반
Feedback Control for Small Budget Pacing
Budget pacing is critical in online advertising to align spend with campaign goals under dynamic auctions. Existing pacing methods often rely on ad-hoc parameter tuning, which can be unstable and inefficient. We propose …
Smart Pacing for Effective Online Ad Campaign Optimization
In targeted online advertising, advertisers look for maximizing campaign performance under delivery constraint within budget schedule. Most of the advertisers typically prefer to impose the delivery constraint to spend b…
Robust Budget Pacing with a Single Sample
Major Internet advertising platforms offer budget pacing tools as a standard service for advertisers to manage their ad campaigns. Given the inherent non-stationarity in an advertiser's value and also competing advertise…
Auction Throttling and Causal Inference of Online Advertising Effects
Causally identifying the effect of digital advertising is challenging, because experimentation is expensive, and observational data lacks random variation. This paper identifies a pervasive source of naturally occurring,…
Causal InferenceStability and Controllability of Revenue Systems via the Bode Approach
In online revenue systems, e.g. an advertising system, budget pacing plays a critical role in ensuring that the spend aligns with desired financial objectives. Pacing systems dynamically control the velocity of spending …