A Real-World Implementation of Unbiased Lift-based Bidding System

TL;DR

This paper presents a practical, unbiased lift-based bidding system for real-time ad auctions that aligns with current billing rules, demonstrating its profitability and effectiveness through extensive real-world experiments.

Contribution

It introduces a practically implementable unbiased lift-based bidding system that fits current billing rules and proves its advantages via real-world campaign experiments.

Findings

Lift-based bidding improves profitability for DSPs and advertisers.

Unbiased lift-based bidding performs best in first-price auction settings.

Extensive experiments validate the effectiveness of the proposed system.

Abstract

In display ad auctions of Real-Time Bid-ding (RTB), a typical Demand-Side Platform (DSP)bids based on the predicted probability of click and conversion right after an ad impression. Recent studies find such a strategy is suboptimal and propose a better bidding strategy named lift-based bidding.Lift-based bidding simply bids the price according to the lift effect of the ad impression and achieves maximization of target metrics such as sales. Despiteits superiority, lift-based bidding has not yet been widely accepted in the advertising industry. For one reason, lift-based bidding is less profitable for DSP providers under the current billing rule. Second, thepractical usefulness of lift-based bidding is not widely understood in the online advertising industry due to the lack of a comprehensive investigation of its impact.We here propose a practically-implementable lift-based bidding system that perfectly fits the current billing rules. We conduct extensive experiments usinga real-world advertising campaign and examine the performance under various settings. We find that lift-based bidding, especially unbiased lift-based bidding is most profitable for both DSP providers and advertisers. Our ablation study highlights that lift-based bidding has a good property for currently dominant first price auctions. The results will motivate the online