Bid landscape forecasting in online ad exchange marketplace

Display advertising has been a significant source of revenue for publishers and ad networks in online advertising ecosystem. One important business model in online display advertising is Ad Exchange marketplace, also called non-guaranteed delivery (NGD), in which advertisers buy targeted page views and audiences on a spot market through real-time auction. In this paper, we describe a bid landscape forecasting system in NGD marketplace for any advertiser campaign specified by a variety of targeting attributes. In the system, the impressions that satisfy the campaign targeting attributes are partitioned into multiple mutually exclusive samples. Each sample is one unique combination of quantified attribute values. We develop a divide-and-conquer approach that breaks down the campaign-level forecasting problem. First, utilizing a novel star-tree data structure, we forecast the bid for each sample using non-linear regression by gradient boosting decision trees. Then we employ a mixture-of-log-normal model to generate campaign-level bid distribution based on the sample-level forecasted distributions. The experiment results of a system developed with our approach show that it can accurately forecast the bid distributions for various campaigns running on the world's largest NGD advertising exchange system, outperforming two baseline methods in term of forecasting errors.