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

Abstract

In display ad auctions of Real-Time Bidding (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. Despite its superiority, lift-based bidding has not yet been widely accepted in the avertising industry. For one reason, lift-based bidding is less profitable for DSP providers under the current billing rule. Second, the practical 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 liftbased bidding system that perfectly fits the current billing rules. We conduct extensive experiments using a real-world advertising campaign and examine the performance under various settings. We find that liftbased 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 We thank Shota Yasui for the insightful comments, Shin Goto, Yuki Toyoda, Naoya Yokoyama, and Nozomu Fujiwara for helping our experiments.