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

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 f or 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 lift-based 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 lift-based 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 advertising industry to consider lift-based advertising.