Display Advertising with Real-Time Bidding (RTB) and Behavioural Targeting

In display and mobile advertising, the most significant progress in recent years is the employment of the so-called Real-Time Bidding (RTB) mechanism to buy and sell ads. RTB essentially facilitates buying an individual ad impression in real time while it is still being generated from a user’s visit. RTB not only scales up the buying process by aggregating a large amount of available inventories across publishers, but more importantly, enables directly targeting individual users. As such, RTB has fundamentally changed the landscape of the digital marketing. Scientifically, the demand for automation, integration, and optimization in RTB also brings new research opportunities in information retrieval, data mining, machine learning, and other related fields. In this monograph, we provide an overview of the fundamental infrastructure, algorithms, and technical challenges and their solutions of this new frontier of computational advertising. The topics we have covered include user response prediction, bid landscape forecasting, bidding algorithms, revenue optimisation, statistical arbitrage, dynamic pricing, and ad fraud detection.