Volume Ranking and Sequential Selection in Programmatic Display Advertising.

Programmatic display advertising, which enables advertisers to make real-time decisions on individual ad display opportunities so as to achieve a precise audience marketing, has become a key technique for online advertising. However, the constrained budget setting still restricts unlimited ad impressions. As a result, a smart strategy for ad impression selection is necessary for the advertisers to maximize positive user responses such as clicks or conversions, under the constraints of both ad volume and campaign budget. In this paper, we borrow in the idea of top-N ranking and filtering techniques from information retrieval and propose an effective ad impression volume ranking method for each ad campaign, followed by a sequential selection strategy considering the remaining ad volume and budget, to smoothly deliver the volume filtering while maximizing campaign efficiency. The extensive experiments on two benchmarking datasets and a commercial ad platform demonstrate large performance superiority of our proposed solution over traditional methods, especially under tight budgets.