Post-click conversion modeling and analysis for non-guaranteed delivery display advertising

Abstract

In on-line search and display advertising, the click-trough rate (CTR) has been traditionally a key measure of ad/campaign effectiveness. More recently, the market has gained interest in more direct measures of profitability, one early alternative is the conversion rate (CVR). CVRs measure the proportion of certain users who take a predefined, desirable action, such as a purchase, registration, download, etc.; as compared to simply page browsing. We provide a detailed analysis of conversion rates in the context of non-guaranteed delivery targeted advertising. In particular we focus on the post-click conversion (PCC) problem or the analysis of conversions after a user click on a referring ad. The key elements we study are the probability of a conversion given a click in a user/page context, P(conversion | click, context). We provide various fundamental properties of this process based on contextual information, formalize the problem of predicting PCC, and propose an approach for measuring attribute relevance when the underlying attribute distribution is non-stationary. We provide experimental analyses based on logged events from a large-scale advertising platform.