Title
Learning to Advertise for Organic Traffic Maximization in E-Commerce Product Feeds
Abstract
Most e-commerce product feeds provide blended results of advertised products and recommended products to consumers. The underlying advertising and recommendation platforms share similar if not exactly the same set of candidate products. Consumers' behaviors on the advertised results constitute part of the recommendation model's training data and therefore can influence the recommended results. We refer to this process as Leverage. Considering this mechanism, we propose a novel perspective that advertisers can strategically bid through the advertising platform to optimize their recommended organic traffic. By analyzing the real-world data, we first explain the principles of Leverage mechanism, i.e., the dynamic models of Leverage. Then we introduce a novel Leverage optimization problem and formulate it with a Markov Decision Process. To deal with the sample complexity challenge in model-free reinforcement learning, we propose a novel Hybrid Training Leverage Bidding (HTLB) algorithm which combines the real-world samples and the emulator-generated samples to boost the learning speed and stability. Our offline experiments as well as the results from the online deployment demonstrate the superior performance of our approach.
Year
DOI
Venue
2019
10.1145/3357384.3357819
Proceedings of the 28th ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management
Keywords
Field
DocType
e-commerce product feeds, interplay between advertisement and recommendation, online advertising, personalized recommendation
World Wide Web,Information retrieval,Computer science,Maximization,E-commerce
Conference
ISBN
Citations 
PageRank 
978-1-4503-6976-3
0
0.34
References 
Authors
0
10
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Dagui Chen100.34
junqi jin21187.95
Weinan Zhang3122897.24
Fei Pan4161.52
Lvyin Niu500.34
Chuan Yu675.46
Jun Wang7164.99
Han Li81276.98
Jian Xu902.03
Kun Gai1031220.61