Automated Audience Segmentation Using Reputation Signals

Maria Daltayanni (USF), Ali Dasdan (KD Consulting), Luca de Alfaro (UCSC)

Selecting the right audience for an advertising campaign is one of the most challenging, time-consuming and costly steps in the advertising process. To target the right audience, advertisers usually have two options: a) market research to identify user segments of interest and b) sophisticated machine learning models trained on data from past campaigns. In this paper we study how demand-side platforms (DSPs) can leverage the data they collect (demographic and behavioral) in order to learn reputation signals about end user convertibility and advertisement (ad) quality. In particular, we propose a reputation system which learns interest scores about end users, as an additional signal of ad conversion, and quality scores about ads, as a signal of campaign success. Then our model builds user segments based on a combination of demographic, behavioral and the new reputation signals and recommends transparent targeting rules that are easy for the advertiser to interpret and refine. We perform an experimental evaluation on industry data that showcases the benefits of our approach for both new and existing advertiser campaigns.

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