Percentile Risk-Constrained Budget Pacing for Guaranteed Display Advertising in Online Optimization

Abstract: Guaranteed display (GD) advertising is a critical component of advertising since it provides publishers with stable revenue and enables advertisers to target specific audiences with guaranteed impressions. However, smooth pacing control for online ad delivery presents a challenge due to significant budget disparities, user arrival distribution drift, and dynamic change between supply and demand. This paper presents robust risk-constrained pacing (RCPacing) that utilizes Lagrangian dual multipliers to fine-tune probabilistic throttling through monotonic mapping functions within the percentile space of impression performance distribution. RCPacing combines distribution drift resilience and compatibility with guaranteed allocation mechanism, enabling us to provide near-optimal online services. We also show that RCPacing achieves $O(\sqrt{T})$ dynamic regret where $T$ is the length of the horizon. RCPacing's effectiveness is validated through offline evaluations and online A/B testing conducted on Taobao brand advertising platform.