MEBS: Multi-task End-to-end Bid Shading for Multi-slot Display Advertising

Zhen Gong, Lvyin Niu, Yang Zhao, Miao Xu, Haoqi Zhang, Zhenzhe Zheng, Zhilin Zhang, Rongquan Bai, Chuan Yu, Jian Xu, Bo Zheng, Fan Wu

Abstract: Online bidding and auction are crucial aspects of the online advertising industry. Conventionally, there is only one slot for ad display and most current studies focus on it. Nowadays, multi-slot display advertising is gradually becoming popular where many ads could be displayed in a list and shown as a whole to users. However, multi-slot display advertising leads to different cost-effectiveness. Advertisers have the incentive to adjust bid prices so as to win the most economical ad positions. In this study, we introduce bid shading into multi-slot display advertising for bid price adjustment with a Multi-task End-to-end Bid Shading~(MEBS) method. We prove the optimality of our method theoretically and examine its performance experimentally. Through extensive offline and online experiments, we demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our method, and we obtain a 7.01% lift in Gross Merchandise Volume, a 7.42% lift in Return on Investment, and a 3.26% lift in ad buy count.