Domain adaptation in display advertising: an application for partner cold-start

Abstract

Digital advertisements connects partners (sellers) to potentially interested online users. Within the digital advertisement domain, there are multiple platforms, e.g., user re-targeting and prospecting. Partners usually start with re-targeting campaigns and later employ prospecting campaigns to reach out to untapped customer base. There are two major challenges involved with prospecting. The first challenge is successful on-boarding of a new partner on the prospecting platform, referred to as partner cold-start problem. The second challenge revolves around the ability to leverage large amounts of re-targeting data for partner cold-start problem. In this work, we study domain adaptation for the partner cold-start problem. To this end, we propose two domain adaptation techniques, SDA-DANN and SDA-Ranking. SDA-DANN and SDA-Ranking extend domain adaptation techniques for partner cold-start by incorporating sub-domain similarities (product category level information). Through rigorous experiments, we demonstrate that our method SDA-DANN outperforms baseline domain adaptation techniques on real-world dataset, obtained from a major online advertiser. Furthermore, we show that our proposed technique SDA-Ranking outperforms baseline methods for low CTR partners.