Optimal Bidding in Multi-Item Multislot Sponsored Search Auctions
Vibhanshu Abhishek () and
Kartik Hosanagar ()
Additional contact information
Vibhanshu Abhishek: H. John Heinz III College of Public Policy and Management, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania 15213
Kartik Hosanagar: The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104
Operations Research, 2013, vol. 61, issue 4, 855-873
Abstract:
We study optimal bidding strategies for advertisers in sponsored search auctions. In general, these auctions are run as variants of second-price auctions but have been shown to be incentive incompatible. Thus, advertisers have to be strategic about bidding. Uncertainty in the decision-making environment, budget constraints, and the presence of a large portfolio of keywords makes the bid optimization problem nontrivial. We present an analytical model to compute the optimal bids for keywords in an advertiser's portfolio. To validate our approach, we estimate the parameters of the model using data from an advertiser's sponsored search campaign and use the bids proposed by the model in a field experiment. The results of the field implementation show that the proposed bidding technique is very effective in practice. We extend our model to account for interactions between keywords, in the form of positive spillovers from generic keywords into branded keywords. The spillovers are estimated using a dynamic linear model framework and are used to jointly optimize the bids of the keywords using an approximate dynamic programming approach. Accounting for the interaction between keywords leads to an additional improvement in the campaign performance.
Keywords: sponsored search; search engine marketing; bid optimization; stochastic optimization; stochastic modeling (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (17)
Downloads: (external link)
http://dx.doi.org/10.1287/opre.2013.1187 (application/pdf)
Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.
Export reference: BibTeX
RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan)
HTML/Text
Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:inm:oropre:v:61:y:2013:i:4:p:855-873
Access Statistics for this article
More articles in Operations Research from INFORMS Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Asher ().