Att-TCN: An Advertising Attribution Method Based on Temporal Convolutional Network with Attention Mechanism

Advertising attribution is an effective method to measure the effect of various advertisements in the era of Internet advertising. It enables scientific tracking back and refined operation of advertising by quantitatively evaluating the contribution of different advertising channels to reach the target. It is challenging to predict conversion results based on users' journey data accurately, reflect the impact of ads on user conversions, and appropriately assign attribution values to advertising channels. To achieve the above objectives, we propose an advertising attribution method based on a temporal convolutional network with an attention mechanism (Att-TCN). By mining the hidden information in time and attribution channels using the attention mechanism, our proposed method can improve the accuracy of conversion prediction and thus more rationally assign attribution values across channels. Experimental validation on a real dataset obtained from an operational commercial advertising monitoring company shows that our proposed attribution method has better accuracy than other state-of-the-art attribution methods and gives an open-ended approach to attribution value assignment.