Targeted display advertising: the case of preferential attachment

An average adult is exposed to hundreds of digital advertisements daily¹, making the digital advertisement industry a classic example of a big-data-driven platform. As such, the ad-tech industry relies on historical engagement logs (clicks or purchases) to identify potentially interested users for the advertisement campaign of a partner (a seller who wants to target users for its products). The number of advertisements that are shown for a partner, and hence the historical campaign data available for a partner depends upon the budget constraints of the partner. Thus, enough data can be collected for the high-budget partners to make accurate predictions, while this is not the case with the low-budget partners. This skewed distribution of the data leads to preferential attachment of the targeted display advertising platforms towards the high-budget partners. In this paper, we develop domain-adaptation approaches to address the challenge of predicting interested users for the partners with insufficient data, i.e., the tail partners. Specifically, we develop simple yet effective approaches that leverage the similarity among the partners to transfer information from the partners with sufficient data to cold-start partners, i.e., partners without any campaign data. Our approaches readily adapt to the new campaign data by incremental fine-tuning, and hence work at varying points of a campaign, and not just the cold-start. We present an experimental analysis on the historical logs of a major display advertising platform². Specifically, we evaluate our approaches across 149 partners, at varying points of their campaigns. Experimental results show that the proposed approaches outperform the other domain-adaptation approaches at different time points of the campaigns.