Additional multi-touch attribution for online advertising

Abstract

Multi-Touch Attribution studies the effects of various types of online advertisements on purchase conversions. It is a very important problem in computational advertising, as it allows marketers to assign credits for conversions to different advertising channels and optimize advertising campaigns. In this paper, we propose an additional multi-touch attribution model (AMTA) based on two obvious assumptions: (1) the effect of an ad exposure is fading with time and (2) the effects of ad exposures on the browsing path of a user are additive. AMTA borrows the techniques from survival analysis and uses the hazard rate to measure the influence of an ad exposure. In addition, we both take the conversion time and the intrinsic conversion rate of users into consideration to generate the probability of a conversion. Experimental results on a large real-world advertising dataset illustrate that the our proposed method is superior to state-of-the-art techniques in conversion rate prediction and the credit allocation based on AMTA is reasonable.