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Targeting converters for new campaigns through factor models

Published: 16 April 2012 Publication History

Abstract

In performance based display advertising, campaign effectiveness is often measured in terms of conversions that represent some desired user actions like purchases and product information requests on advertisers' website. Hence, identifying and targeting potential converters is of vital importance to boost campaign performance. This is often accomplished by marketers who define the user base of campaigns based on behavioral, demographic, search, social, purchase, and other characteristics. Such a process is manual and subjective, it often fails to utilize the full potential of targeting. In this paper we show that by using past converted users of campaigns and campaign meta-data (e.g., ad creatives, landing pages), we can combine disparate user information in a principled way to effectively and automatically target converters for new/existing campaigns. At the heart of our approach is a factor model that estimates the affinity of each user feature to a campaign using historical conversion data. In fact, our approach allows building a conversion model for a brand new campaign through campaign meta-data alone, and hence targets potential converters even before the campaign is run. Through extensive experiments, we show the superiority of our factor model approach relative to several other baselines. Moreover, we show that the performance of our approach at the beginning of a campaign's life is typically better than the other models even when they are trained using all conversion data after the campaign has completed. This clearly shows the importance and value of using historical campaign data in constructing an effective audience selection strategy for display advertising.

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Cited By

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  • (2016)In-Depth Survey of Digital Advertising TechnologiesIEEE Communications Surveys & Tutorials10.1109/COMST.2016.251991218:3(2124-2148)Online publication date: 1-Jul-2016
  • (2013)Detecting User Preference on MicroblogDatabase Systems for Advanced Applications10.1007/978-3-642-37450-0_16(219-227)Online publication date: 2013

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    cover image ACM Other conferences
    WWW '12: Proceedings of the 21st international conference on World Wide Web
    April 2012
    1078 pages
    ISBN:9781450312295
    DOI:10.1145/2187836
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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    New York, NY, United States

    Publication History

    Published: 16 April 2012

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    Author Tags

    1. conversions
    2. factor
    3. targeting

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    • Research-article

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    WWW 2012
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    • Univ. de Lyon
    WWW 2012: 21st World Wide Web Conference 2012
    April 16 - 20, 2012
    Lyon, France

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    View all
    • (2016)In-Depth Survey of Digital Advertising TechnologiesIEEE Communications Surveys & Tutorials10.1109/COMST.2016.251991218:3(2124-2148)Online publication date: 1-Jul-2016
    • (2013)Detecting User Preference on MicroblogDatabase Systems for Advanced Applications10.1007/978-3-642-37450-0_16(219-227)Online publication date: 2013

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