Follow the TRACE: Exploiting Post-Click Trajectories for Online Delayed Conversion Rate Prediction
For online advertising platforms, TRACE improves conversion rate prediction accuracy under delayed feedback, a critical bottleneck in real-time bidding systems.
TRACE addresses delayed feedback in online CVR prediction by modeling post-click behavior trajectories, achieving superior performance over state-of-the-art baselines. The method dynamically refines posteriors without waiting for final outcomes and includes a reliability-gated retrospective completer that enhances existing systems.
Delayed feedback poses a core challenge for online CVR prediction, forcing a trade-off between label accuracy and data freshness. Existing methods address this through delay modeling or sample reweighting, yet neglect how post-click behaviors evolve over the observation period. To overcome this limitation, we formalize this evolution as feedback trajectory and propose TRACE. Instead of forcing hard labels on unrevealed samples, our method evaluates how well the accumulated feedback status aligns with conversion versus non-conversion, dynamically refining posteriors without waiting for final outcomes. To counteract early-stage trajectory sparsity, we further design a reliability-gated retrospective completer that leverages full-lifecycle data to provide adaptive posterior guidance for unrevealed samples. Extensive experiments validate TRACE's superiority over state-of-the-art baselines and confirm the retrospective completion module as a model-agnostic enhancer for existing systems. Our code is available at https://github.com/LunaZhangxy/TRACE.