MCMF: Multi-Constraints With Merging Features Bid Optimization in Online Display Advertising

TL;DR

This paper introduces the MCMF framework for bid optimization in RTB advertising, effectively handling sparse, delayed feedback and integrating budget management to improve conversions and stability.

Contribution

The MCMF framework uniquely merges bidding features and formulates a dynamic cost function, enabling stable, integrated optimization without environment modeling.

Findings

Achieves 2.69% more conversions in real RTB production.

Maintains stable budget management under extreme feedback sparsity.

Outperforms existing methods on open datasets.

Abstract

In the Real-Time Bidding (RTB), advertisers are increasingly relying on bid optimization to gain more conversions (i.e trade or arrival). Currently, the efficiency of bid optimization is still challenged by the (1) sparse feedback, (2) the budget management separated from the optimization, and (3) absence of bidding environment modeling. The conversion feedback is delayed and sparse, yet most methods rely on dense input (impression or click). Furthermore, most approaches are implemented in two stages: optimum formulation and budget management, but the separation always degrades performance. Meanwhile, absence of bidding environment modeling, model-free controllers are commonly utilized, which perform poorly on sparse feedback and lead to control instability. We address these challenges and provide the Multi-Constraints with Merging Features (MCMF) framework. It collects various bidding statuses as merging features to promise performance on the sparse and delayed feedback. A cost function is formulated as dynamic optimum solution with budget management, the optimization and budget management are not separated. According to the cost function, the approximated gradients based on the Hebbian Learning Rule are capable of updating the MCMF, even without modeling of the bidding environment. Our technique performs the best in the open dataset and provides stable budget management even in extreme sparsity. The MCMF is applied in our real RTB production and we get 2.69% more conversions with 2.46% fewer expenditures.