Digital Advertising Traffic Operation: Flow Management Analysis

TL;DR

This paper presents a MILP model for managing web advertising campaign workflows, analyzing flow bottlenecks, and proposing new punctuality indicators to improve traffic operation efficiency.

Contribution

It introduces a novel MILP formulation for campaign flow management, analyzes the relationship between punctuality indicators, and proposes more sustainable metrics for traffic operations.

Findings

Classic punctuality indicators conflict with reducing waiting times.

Flow of campaigns is the main bottleneck in traffic operations.

Alternate paths do not improve performance indicators.

Abstract

In a Web Advertising Traffic Operation the Trafficking Routing Problem (TRP) consists in scheduling the management of Web Advertising (Adv) campaign between Trafficking campaigns in the most efficient way to oversee and manage relationship with partners and internal teams, managing expectations through integration and post-launch in order to ensure success for every stakeholders involved. For our own interest we did that independent research projects also through specific innovative tasks validate towards average working time declared on "specification required" by the main worldwide industry leading Advertising Agency. We present a Mixed Integer Linear Programming (MILP) formulation for end-to-end management of campaign workflow along a predetermined path and generalize it to include alternative path to oversee and manage detail-oriented relationship with partners and internal teams to achieve the goals above mentioned. To meet clients' KPIs, we consider an objective function that includes the punctuality indicators (the average waiting time and completion times) but also the main punctuality indicators (the average delay and the on time performance). Then we investigate their analytical relationships in the advertising domain through experiments based on real data from a Traffic Office. We show that the classic punctuality indicators are in contradiction with the task of reducing waiting times. We propose new indicators used for a synthesize analysis on projects or process changes for the wider team that are more sustainable, but also more relevant for stakeholders. We also show that the flow of a campaign (adv-ways) is the main bottleneck of a Traffic Office and that alternate paths cannot improve the performance indicators.