Dynamic Bidding Strategies with Multivariate Feedback Control for Multiple Goals in Display Advertising

Real-Time Bidding (RTB) display advertising is a method for purchasing display advertising inventory in auctions that occur within milliseconds. The performance of RTB campaigns is generally measured with a series of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) - measurements used to ensure that the campaign is cost-effective and that it is purchasing valuable inventory. While an RTB campaign should ideally meet all KPIs, simultaneous improvement tends to be very challenging, as an improvement to any one KPI risks a detrimental effect toward the others. Here we present an approach to simultaneously controlling multiple KPIs with a PID-based feedback-control system. This method generates a control score for each KPI, based on both the output of a PID controller module and a metric that quantifies the importance of each KPI for internal business needs. On regular intervals, this algorithm - Sequential Control - will choose the KPI with the greatest overall need for improvement. In this way, our algorithm is able to continually seek the greatest marginal improvements to its current state. Multiple methods of control can be associated with each KPI, and can be triggered either simultaneously or chosen stochastically, in order to avoid local optima. In both offline ad bidding simulations and testing on live traffic, our methods proved to be effective in simultaneously controlling multiple KPIs, and bringing them toward their respective goals.