Mid-flight Forecasting for CPA Lines in Online Advertising
This work addresses a domain-specific challenge for Verizon Media's DSP and advertisers by providing actionable insights for campaign management, but it is incremental as it builds on existing forecasting methods.
The paper tackles the problem of forecasting ad campaign performance mid-flight for CPA lines in online advertising by incorporating bidding mechanisms, and it demonstrates promising accuracy when validated against actual deliveries.
For Verizon MediaDemand Side Platform(DSP), forecasting of ad campaign performance not only feeds key information to the optimization server to allow the system to operate on a high-performance mode, but also produces actionable insights to the advertisers. In this paper, the forecasting problem for CPA lines in the middle of the flight is investigated by taking the bidding mechanism into account. The proposed methodology generates relationships between various key performance metrics and optimization signals. It can also be used to estimate the sensitivity of ad campaign performance metrics to the adjustments of optimization signal, which is important to the design of a campaign management system. The relationship between advertiser spends and effective Cost Per Action(eCPA) is also characterized, which serves as a guidance for mid-flight line adjustment to the advertisers. Several practical issues in implementation, such as downsampling of the dataset, are also discussed in the paper. At last, the forecasting results are validated against actual deliveries and demonstrates promising accuracy.