Biblio

Advertising channels have evolved from conventional print media, billboards and radio-advertising to online digital advertising (ad), where the users are exposed to a sequence of ad campaigns via social networks, display ads, search etc. While advertisers revisit the design of ad campaigns to concurrently serve the requirements emerging out of new ad channels, it is also critical for advertisers to estimate the contribution from touch-points (view, clicks, converts) on different channels, based on the sequence of customer actions. This process of contribution measurement is often referred to as multi-touch attribution (MTA). In this work, we propose CAMTA, a novel deep recurrent neural network architecture which is a causal attribution mechanism for user-personalised MTA in the context of observational data. CAMTA minimizes the selection bias in channel assignment across time-steps and touchpoints. Furthermore, it utilizes the users' pre-conversion actions in a principled way in order to predict per-channel attribution. To quantitatively benchmark the proposed MTA model, we employ the real-world Criteo dataset and demonstrate the superior performance of CAMTA with respect to prediction accuracy as compared to several baselines. In addition, we provide results for budget allocation and user-behaviour modeling on the predicted channel attribution.

Multi-touch attribution, which allows distributing the credit to all related advertisements based on their corresponding contributions, has recently become an important research topic in digital advertising. Traditionally, rule-based attribution models have been used in practice. The drawback of such rule-based models lies in the fact that the rules are not derived form the data but only based on simple intuition. With the ever enhanced capability to tracking advertisement and users' interaction with the advertisement, data-driven multi-touch attribution models, which attempt to infer the contribution from user interaction data, become an important research direction. We here propose a new data-driven attribution model based on survival theory. By adopting a probabilistic framework, one key advantage of the proposed model is that it is able to remove the presentation biases inherit to most of the other attribution models. In addition to model the attribution, the proposed model is also able to predict user's 'conversion' probability. We validate the proposed method with a real-world data set obtained from a operational commercial advertising monitoring company. Experiment results have shown that the proposed method is quite promising in both conversion prediction and attribution.