Optimal Reserve Price for Online Ads Trading Based on Inventory Identification

TL;DR

This paper presents a novel method for dynamically predicting optimal reserve prices in online ad auctions, focusing on high-value inventories to significantly boost seller revenue without disrupting existing models.

Contribution

The authors introduce a new inventory value identification approach using cascaded classifiers to improve reserve price setting in online ad auctions, a previously unexplored perspective.

Findings

Significant revenue lift achieved in simulations

Effective identification of high-value inventories

Compatibility with existing reserve price models

Abstract

The online ads trading platform plays a crucial role in connecting publishers and advertisers and generates tremendous value in facilitating the convenience of our lives. It has been evolving into a more and more complicated structure. In this paper, we consider the problem of maximizing the revenue for the seller side via utilizing proper reserve price for the auctions in a dynamical way. Predicting the optimal reserve price for each auction in the repeated auction marketplaces is a non-trivial problem. However, we were able to come up with an efficient method of improving the seller revenue by mainly focusing on adjusting the reserve price for those high-value inventories. Previously, no dedicated work has been performed from this perspective. Inspired by Paul and Michael, our model first identifies the value of the inventory by predicting the top bid price bucket using a cascade of classifiers. The cascade is essential in significantly reducing the false positive rate of a single classifier. Based on the output of the first step, we build another cluster of classifiers to predict the price separations between the top two bids. We showed that although the high-value auctions are only a small portion of all the traffic, successfully identifying them and setting correct reserve price would result in a significant revenue lift. Moreover, our optimization is compatible with all other reserve price models in the system and does not impact their performance. In other words, when combined with other models, the enhancement on exchange revenue will be aggregated. Simulations on randomly sampled Yahoo ads exchange (YAXR) data showed stable and expected lift after applying our model.