RLTP: Reinforcement Learning to Pace for Delayed Impression Modeling in Preloaded Ads

Penghui Wei, Yongqiang Chen, ShaoGuo Liu, Liang Wang, Bo Zheng

Abstract: To increase brand awareness, many advertisers conclude contracts with advertising platforms to purchase traffic and deliver advertisements to target audiences. In a whole delivery period, advertisers desire a certain impression count for the ads, and they expect that the delivery performance is as good as possible. Advertising platforms employ real-time pacing algorithms to satisfy the demands. However, the delivery procedure is also affected by publishers. Preloading is a widely used strategy for many types of ads (e.g., video ads) to make sure that the response time for displaying is legitimate, which results in delayed impression phenomenon. In this paper, we focus on a new research problem of impression pacing for preloaded ads, and propose a Reinforcement Learning To Pace framework RLTP. It learns a pacing agent that sequentially produces selection probabilities in the whole delivery period. To jointly optimize the objectives of impression count and delivery performance, RLTP employs tailored reward estimator to satisfy guaranteed impression count, penalize over-delivery and maximize traffic value. Experiments on large-scale datasets verify that RLTP outperforms baselines by a large margin. We have deployed it online to our advertising platform, and it achieves significant uplift for delivery completion rate and click-through rate.