Patent Application
20140058830
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The invention disclosed broadly relates to the field of on-line pricing, and more particularly relates to the field of a simulation framework to analyze a sell-through rate.
In the field of display advertising it is necessary to compute an appropriate price to be used as a guideline to book guaranteed delivery (GD) contracts. When a pricing query arrives, the display advertising system first calculates the base price based on the booked price of historical contracts in a neighborhood and then makes adjustment according to changes in market conditions measured by current Sell Through Rate (STR) at that instant in time and target STR. The adjusted price is finally compared with the forecasted price at the Non Guaranteed Delivery (NGD) market to make sure the GD price is not lower than the NGD opportunity cost.
One of the key components of the pricing system component is Price Response in which the real production system monitors the market conditions measured as current Sell Through Rate (STR) and compares to the target STR to decide whether and by how much to adjust price to reach the target. Changes in market conditions are measured by the difference between the current STR and the target STR. The target STR of a particular lead time is set to the average historical STR of the same lead time. The target STR must be set to the value that reflects the historical market conditions.
Briefly, according to an embodiment of the invention a method for evaluating sell through rate in on-line guaranteed display advertising systems includes steps or acts of: receiving a set of eligible advertisement samples for a selected profile for a contract at different time durations; receiving an allocation plan representative of an allocation of future impressions of currently booked contracts; receiving eligible and available impressions for the selected profile at the specific time duration, using the set of eligible samples and the allocation plan; computing a historical sell through rate of the selected profile for the specific time duration as one minus a quotient of available impressions divided by eligible impressions; and computing a target sell through rate for a future time duration by applying the historical sell through rate to the future time duration.
To describe the foregoing and other exemplary purposes, aspects, and advantages, we use the following detailed description of an exemplary embodiment of the invention with reference to the drawings, in which:
While the invention as claimed can be modified into alternative forms, specific embodiments thereof are shown by way of example in the drawings and will herein be described in detail. It should be understood, however, that the drawings and detailed description thereto are not intended to limit the invention to the particular form disclosed, but on the contrary, the intention is to cover all modifications, equivalents and alternatives falling within the scope of the present invention.
Before describing in detail embodiments that are in accordance with the present invention, it should be observed that the embodiments reside primarily in combinations of method steps and system components related to systems and methods for placing computation inside a communication network. Accordingly, the system components and method steps have been represented where appropriate by conventional symbols in the drawings, showing only those specific details that are pertinent to understanding the embodiments of the present invention so as not to obscure the disclosure with details that will be readily apparent to those of ordinary skill in the art having the benefit of the description herein. Thus, it will be appreciated that for simplicity and clarity of illustration, common and well-understood elements that are useful or necessary in a commercially feasible embodiment may not be depicted in order to facilitate a less obstructed view of these various embodiments.
We describe an offline simulation framework and methodology used to analyze historical market conditions and trends in order to help set a goal for pricing products. The purpose of this offline simulation framework is to set an initial target Sell Through Rate for a product. The simulation framework involves major components such as Admission Control, Optimization and Supply Forecasting. The framework allows us to understand the market trend historically for various Internet properties. Following are definitions for the terminology used throughout this disclosure.
Contract. A contract represents the inventory of a specific inventory profile that an advertiser wants to buy. We also use the term query which carries a similar meaning.
Sample. A sample represents an inventory impression that is eligible to be served for a specific contract.
Lead time. The difference between the contract's query (or booking) time and start time. E.g. if a contract's query time is Jun. 1, 2009 and its start date is Jan. 1, 2010, then the lead time is seven months.
Supply forecast. For a given inventory profile, the supply forecast module returns the eligible samples based upon the historical impression data (supply forecast snapshot).
Optimizer. For a given list of contracts, the Optimizer module generates an allocation plan which encapsulates the information to be used at serving time. It can be used to determine the allocated inventory for each of the contracts in the list.
Admission Control. The framework makes use of an Admission Control module to compute the eligible and available number of impressions. The Admission Control module takes as input the allocation plan and samples for a given query (contract), and returns the number of eligible impressions and available impressions for the query.
The target STR must be set to the value that reflects the historical market conditions, which traditionally has not been recorded at the granularity required by the framework. We address this omission by using offline simulation based on real historical production data.
For a given inventory profile for contract (or query) c and delivery duration (t1,t2), we define its historical STR as [1—(availability/eligibility)], where availability and eligibility denote the available and eligible number of advertisement impressions for contract c during the time interval (t1,t2). Further, we define lead time as the difference between a contract's query (or booking) time and start time. For example, if a contract's query time is (Jun. 1, 2009) and its start date is (Jan. 1, 2010) then in this case lead time is seven months. The start date is the first date of the contract's delivery-duration.
We then compute the historical sell-through-rate for the same query-duration but with different lead-times and for all eligible supply-forecast snapshots. Therefore, for a given (inventory-profile, delivery-duration) we may have multiple sell-through-rate values, each corresponding to a different lead-time (one for every valid supply-forecast-snapshot that was used). For example, suppose we want to query for inventory-profile=(mail, lrec) and delivery-duration is (January 2012, February 2012, March 2012, April 2012). And also assume that we have a supply-forecast snapshot for (January 2012, February 2012, March 2012, April 2012). Then we calculate historical sell-through-rate as shown in
As
There is a distinction between an available impression and an eligible impression. This distinction is easily understood in terms of inventory. Eligible impressions are analogous to total inventory of advertisements for a given profile and duration; whereas available impressions are analogous to available inventory of advertisements for that profile and duration. For a given contract, the eligible impressions denote the total number of impressions that satisfy the targeting constraints imposed by contract. However, due to other contracts that are already booked in the systems, some of these eligible impressions may have been already allocated to be used for other contracts. The available impressions denote the number of impressions that are eligible and also not allocated yet to other contracts and as such are available for new contracts.
The offline simulation framework and methodology enables us to analyze and understand the market conditions and trends at a granular level that was previously not available. Referring to the drawings and to
STR-Queries 110.
Referring now to the flowchart of
Supply Forecast 120.
For a given query (contract) from the above list with specific delivery duration, the Supply Forecast module 120 is used with specific historical snapshot data to generate approximately 1000 eligible impression samples in step 220.
Optimizer 130.
For a given list of booked contracts at a snapshot in history, the Optimizer module 130 generates an allocation plan which is a compact representation of the allocation of future impressions (inventory) to the currently booked contracts in step 225. The allocation plan is computed by The Optimizer 130 with a multi-objective optimization function (one of the objectives could be revenue) to determine the allocation of inventory to the booked contracts in step 225. Admission Control 140. For an incoming query with inventory profile and delivery duration, we invoke the Admission Control module 140 to calculate the eligible and available impressions based on the updated allocation plan in step 230.
Target STR Computation 150.
Referring now to the flowchart of
Concurrently in step 320 we identify thirteen Supply Forecast 125 instances available in the duration (Jun. 1, 2009-Jun. 30, 2010) for each month. In step 330, for each of these supply forecast snapshots, we select the STR-Queries whose duration lies within next twelve month period and then we invoke Supply Forecast Module 125 to generate approximately 1000 eligible samples per contract.
Then in step 340 for each supply forecast instance and corresponding allocation plan and selected STR-queries, we invoke the Admission Control module to generate eligibility and availability in order to calculate the STR. As such, a given STR query may have up to thirteen different STR values for different query time corresponding to the supply-forecast instances. As an example, if a contract has duration (Jan. 1, 2010-Jan. 31, 2010), then we could use eight supply forecast instances (June 2009, . . . , January 2010) and as such have different STR values corresponding to different query time (June 2009, . . . , January 2010). Using this data, for each query in base-STR-Queries, in step 350 we set target STR for twelve different lead-times.
As will be appreciated by one skilled in the art, the present invention may be embodied as a system, method or computer program product. Accordingly, the present invention may take the form of an entirely hardware embodiment, an entirely software embodiment (including firmware, resident software, micro-code, etc.) or an embodiment combining software and hardware aspects that may all generally be referred to herein as a “circuit,” “module” or “system.” Furthermore, the present invention may take the form of a computer program product embodied in any tangible medium of expression having computer-usable program code embodied in the medium.
Any combination of one or more computer usable or computer readable medium(s) may be utilized. The computer-usable or computer-readable medium may be, for example but not limited to, an electronic, magnetic, optical, electromagnetic, infrared, or semiconductor system, apparatus, device, or propagation medium. More specific examples (a non-exhaustive list) of the computer-readable medium would include the following: an electrical connection having one or more wires, a portable computer diskette, a hard disk, a random access memory (RAM), a read-only memory (ROM), an erasable programmable read-only memory (EPROM or Flash memory), an optical fiber, a portable compact disc read-only memory (CD-ROM), an optical storage device, a transmission media such as those supporting the Internet or an intranet, or a magnetic storage device.
Hardware Embodiment.
Referring now in specific detail to the drawings, and particularly
In general, the routines which are executed when implementing these embodiments, whether implemented as part of an operating system or a specific application, component, program, object, module or sequence of instructions, will be referred to herein as computer programs, or simply programs. The computer programs typically comprise one or more instructions that are resident at various times in various memory and storage devices in an information processing or handling system such as a computer, and that, when read and executed by one or more processors, cause that system to perform the steps necessary to execute steps or elements embodying the various aspects of the invention.
Throughout the description herein, an embodiment of the invention is illustrated with aspects of the invention embodied solely on computer system 400. As will be appreciated by those of ordinary skill in the art, aspects of the invention may be distributed amongst one or more networked computing devices which interact with computer system 400 via one or more data networks such as, for example, network 490. However, for ease of understanding, aspects of the invention have been embodied in a single computing device—computer system 400.
Computer system 400 includes processing device 402 which communicates with various input devices, output devices and network 490. The processor 402 is connected to a communication infrastructure 422 (e.g., a communications bus, cross-over bar, or network). The processor device 402 may be a general or special purpose microprocessor operating under control of computer program instructions executed from memory 404. The processor may include a number of special purpose sub-processors, each sub-processor for executing particular portions of the computer program instructions. Each sub-processor may be a separate circuit able to operate substantially in parallel with the other sub-processors. Some or all of the sub-processors may be implemented as computer program processes (software) tangibly stored in a memory that perform their respective functions when executed. These may share an instruction processor, such as a general purpose integrated circuit microprocessor, or each sub-processor may have its own processor for executing instructions. Alternatively, some or all of the sub-processors may be implemented in an ASIC. RAM may be embodied in one or more memory chips. The memory may be partitioned or otherwise mapped to reflect the boundaries of the various memory subcomponents.
Memory 404 includes both volatile and persistent memory for the storage of: operational instructions for execution by CPU 402, data registers, application storage and the like. Memory 404 preferably includes a combination of random access memory (RAM), read only memory (ROM) and persistent memory such as that provided by a hard disk drive. The computer instructions/applications stored in memory 504 and executed by processor device 402.
The I/O subsystem 406 may comprise various end user interfaces such as a display, a keyboards, and a mouse. The I/O subsystem 406 may further comprise a connection to a network such as a local-area network (LAN) or wide-area network (WAN) such as the Internet. The computer system may include a display interface 408 that forwards graphics, text, and other data from the communication infrastructure 412 (or from a frame buffer not shown) for display on a display unit. The computer system also includes a main memory 404, preferably random access memory (RAM), and may also include a secondary memory 412. The secondary memory 412 may include, for example, a hard disk drive 414 and/or a removable storage drive 411, representing a floppy disk drive, a magnetic tape drive, an optical disk drive, etc. The removable storage drive 411 reads from and/or writes to a removable storage unit 418 in a manner well known to those having ordinary skill in the art. Removable storage unit 418, represents a floppy disk, a compact disc, magnetic tape, optical disk, etc. which is read by and written to by removable storage drive 411. As will be appreciated, the removable storage unit 418 includes a computer readable medium having stored therein computer software and/or data.
The computer system may also include a communications interface 412. Communications interface 412 allows software and data to be transferred between the computer system and external devices. Examples of communications interface 412 may include a modem, a network interface (such as an Ethernet card), a communications port, a PCMCIA slot and card, etc. Software and data transferred via communications interface 412 are in the form of signals which may be, for example, electronic, electromagnetic, optical, or other signals capable of being received by communications interface 412. These signals are provided to communications interface 412 via a communications path (i.e., channel). This channel carries signals and may be implemented using wire or cable, fiber optics, a phone line, a cellular phone link, an RF link, and/or other communications channels, either known or to be developed.
Therefore, while there has been described what is presently considered to be the preferred embodiment, it will understood by those skilled in the art that other modifications can be made within the spirit of the invention. The above description(s) of embodiment(s) is not intended to be exhaustive or limiting in scope. The embodiment(s), as described, were chosen in order to explain the principles of the invention, show its practical application, and enable those with ordinary skill in the art to understand how to make and use the invention. It should be understood that the invention is not limited to the embodiment(s) described above, but rather should be interpreted within the full meaning and scope of the appended claims.
