Audience Prospecting for Dynamic-Product-Ads in Native Advertising

With yearly revenue exceeding one billion USD, Yahoo Gemini native advertising marketplace serves more than two billion impressions daily to hundreds of millions of unique users. One of the fastest growing segments of Gemini native is dynamic-product-ads (DPA), where major advertisers, such as Amazon and Walmart, provide catalogs with millions of products for the system to choose from and present to users. The subject of this work is finding and expanding the right audience for each DPA ad, which is one of the many challenges DPA presents. Approaches such as targeting various user groups, e.g., users who already visited the advertisers' websites (Retargeting), users that searched for certain products (Search-Prospecting), or users that reside in preferred locations (Location-Prospecting), have limited audience expansion capabilities. In this work we present two new approaches for audience expansion that also maintain predefined performance goals. The Conversion-Prospecting approach predicts DPA conversion rates based on Gemini native logged data, and calculates the expected cost-per-action (CPA) for determining users' eligibility to products and optimizing DPA bids in Gemini native auctions. To support new advertisers and products, the Trending-Prospecting approach matches trending products to users by learning their tendency towards products from advertisers' sites logged events. The tendency scores indicate the popularity of the product and the similarity of the user to those who have previously engaged with this product. The two new prospecting approaches were tested online, serving real Gemini native traffic, demonstrating impressive DPA delivery and DPA revenue lifts while maintaining most traffic within the acceptable CPA range (i.e., performance goal). After a successful testing phase, the proposed approaches are currently in production and serve all Gemini native traffic.