Feedback Control of Real-Time Display Advertising

TL;DR

This paper introduces a feedback control system for Real-Time Bidding in display advertising, enabling dynamic bid adjustments to stabilize campaign KPIs and optimize performance using real-world data and deployment results.

Contribution

It presents a novel feedback control mechanism for RTB that stabilizes KPIs and optimizes campaign outcomes, with empirical validation and deployment on a commercial platform.

Findings

Effective in stabilizing campaign KPIs

Improves campaign performance and cost efficiency

Successfully deployed in real-world RTB platform

Abstract

Real-Time Bidding (RTB) is revolutionising display advertising by facilitating per-impression auctions to buy ad impressions as they are being generated. Being able to use impression-level data, such as user cookies, encourages user behaviour targeting, and hence has significantly improved the effectiveness of ad campaigns. However, a fundamental drawback of RTB is its instability because the bid decision is made per impression and there are enormous fluctuations in campaigns' key performance indicators (KPIs). As such, advertisers face great difficulty in controlling their campaign performance against the associated costs. In this paper, we propose a feedback control mechanism for RTB which helps advertisers dynamically adjust the bids to effectively control the KPIs, e.g., the auction winning ratio and the effective cost per click. We further formulate an optimisation framework to show that the proposed feedback control mechanism also has the ability of optimising campaign performance. By settling the effective cost per click at an optimal reference value, the number of campaign's ad clicks can be maximised with the budget constraint. Our empirical study based on real-world data verifies the effectiveness and robustness of our RTB control system in various situations. The proposed feedback control mechanism has also been deployed on a commercial RTB platform and the online test has shown its success in generating controllable advertising performance.