Metaheuristic for optimizing targeted offers in Direct Marketing

In direct marketing campaigns, the optimization of target offers problem is a big business concern. The main goal is to maximize profit of company by reaching the right client. The main problems faced by advertisers is to configure a campaign properly by selecting the appropriate target, so it is guaranteed a high acceptance of users to adverts. But, Firstly, taking into account the combinatorial nature of the problem, on the other hand, when dealing with large database, approaches based on mathematical programming methods, said exact, appear limited. In this article, and since this problem belongs to the class of NP-hard problems, the use of a metaheuristic is needed; the bat algorithm which is a new inspired algorithm is proposed. Computational experiments show that the Bat algorithm was able to give good and competitive solutions.