Deep Landscape Forecasting in Multi-Slot Real-Time Bidding

Real-Time Bidding (RTB) has shown remarkable success in display advertising and has been employed in other advertising scenarios, e.g., sponsored search advertising with multiple ad slots. Many current RTB techniques built for single-slot display advertising are thus no longer applicable, especially in the bid landscape forecasting. Landscape forecasting predicts market competition, including the highest bid price and winning probability, which is preliminary and crucial for the subsequent bidding strategy design. In the multi-slot advertising, predicting the winning prices for each position requires a more precise differentiation of bids among top advertisers. Furthermore, defining the winning probability and addressing censorship issues are not as straightforward as in the case of a single slot. In view of these challenges, how to forecast the bidding landscape in the multi-slot environment remains open.