Online Causal Inference for Advertising in Real-Time Bidding Auctions

Understand

Real-time bidding (RTB) systems, which utilize auctions to allocate user impressions to competing advertisers, continue to enjoy success in digital advertising.

• Assessing the effectiveness of such advertising remains a challenge in research and practice.
• This paper proposes a new approach to perform causal inference on advertising bought through such mechanisms.
• Leveraging the economic structure of first- and second-price auctions, we first show that the effects of advertising are identified by the optimal bids.