Real-time Bidding campaigns optimization using attribute selection

Real-Time Bidding is nowadays one of the most promising systems in the online advertising ecosystem. In the presented study, the performance of RTB campaigns is improved by optimising the parameters of the users' profiles and the publishers' websites. Most studies about optimising RTB campaigns are focused on the bidding strategy. In contrast, the objective of our research consists of optimising RTB campaigns by finding out configurations that maximise both the number of impressions and their average profitability. The experiments demonstrate that, when the number of required visits by advertisers is low, it is easy to find configurations with high average profitability, but as the required number of visits increases, the average profitability tends to go down. Additionally, configuration optimisation has been combined with other interesting strategies to increase, even more, the campaigns' profitability. Along with parameter configuration the study considers the following complementary strategies to increase profitability: i) selecting multiple configurations with a small number of visits instead of a unique configuration with a large number, ii) discarding visits according to the thresholds of cost and profitability, iii) analysing a reduced space of the dataset and extrapolating the solution, and iv) increasing the search space by including solutions below the required number of visits. The developed campaign optimisation methodology could be offered by RTB platforms to advertisers to make their campaigns more profitable.