Budget planning for coupled campaigns in search auctions

Budget-related decisions in search auctions are recognized as a structured decision problem, rather than a simple constraint. Budget planning over several coupled campaigns remains a challenging but utterly important task in search advertisements. In this paper, we propose a multi-campaign budget planning approach using optimal control techniques, with consideration of the substitute relationship between advertising campaigns. A measure of coupled relationships between campaigns is presented, e.g., the overlapping degree (O) in terms of campaign contents, promotional periods and target regions. We also discuss some desirable properties of our model and possible solutions. Furthermore, computational experiments are conducted to evaluate our model and identified properties, with real-world data collected from logs and reports of practical campaigns. Experimental results show that, (a) coupled campaigns with higher overlapping degrees can reduce the optimal budget level and the optimal revenue, and also arrive the budgeting cap earlier; (b) The advertising effort could be seriously weakened when ignoring the overlapping degree between campaigns.