An Adaptive Unified Allocation Framework for Guaranteed Display Advertising

Guaranteed Display (GD) is widely used in e-commerce marketing for advertisers to acquire an agreed-upon number of impressions with target audiences. With the main objective to maximize the contract delivery rate under contract constraints, user interest (such as click-through rate and conversion rate) is also essential to improve the long-time return on investment for advertisers and the e-commerce platform. In this paper, we design an adaptive unified allocation framework (AUAF) by not only considering supply of audience impressions in request-level but also avoiding over-allocation of audience impressions. Specifically, our allocation model simultaneously optimizes the contract delivery and the match between advertisements and user interests with explicit constraint to prevent unnecessary allocation. Facing the challenge of serving billion-scale requests per day, a parameter-server based parallel optimization algorithm is also developed, enabling the proposed allocation model to be efficiently optimized and incrementally updated in minutes. Thus, the offline optimization results and the online decisions can be synchronized for real-time serving. In other words, our approach can achieve adaptive pacing that is consistent with the optimal allocation solution. Our extensive experimental results demonstrate that the proposed AUAF framework can improve both contract delivery rate and average click-through rate (CTR), which we use to measure the user interest in this paper. The improvements on CTR are statistically significant in comparison with existing methods. Moreover, since March 2020, AUAF has been deployed in the guaranteed display advertising system of Alibaba, bringing more than 10% increase on CTR without loss of contract delivery rate, which has resulted in significant value creation for the business.