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A Unified Framework for Marketing Budget Allocation

Published: 25 July 2019 Publication History

Abstract

While marketing budget allocation has been studied for decades in traditional business, nowadays online business brings much more challenges due to the dynamic environment and complex decision-making process. In this paper, we present a novel unified framework for marketing budget allocation. By leveraging abundant data, the proposed data-driven approach can help us to overcome the challenges and make more informed decisions. In our approach, a semi-black-box model is built to forecast the dynamic market response and an efficient optimization method is proposed to solve the complex allocation task. First, the response in each market-segment is forecasted by exploring historical data through a semi-black-box model, where the capability of logit demand curve is enhanced by neural networks. The response model reveals relationship between sales and marketing cost. Based on the learned model, budget allocation is then formulated as an optimization problem, and we design efficient algorithms to solve it in both continuous and discrete settings. Several kinds of business constraints are supported in one unified optimization paradigm, including cost upper bound, profit lower bound, or ROI lower bound. The proposed framework is easy to implement and readily to handle large-scale problems. It has been successfully applied to many scenarios in Alibaba Group. The results of both offline experiments and online A/B testing demonstrate its effectiveness.

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cover image ACM Conferences
KDD '19: Proceedings of the 25th ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery & Data Mining
July 2019
3305 pages
ISBN:9781450362016
DOI:10.1145/3292500
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Publication History

Published: 25 July 2019

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Author Tags

  1. budget allocation
  2. forecasting
  3. market response
  4. marketing
  5. optimization

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KDD '19 Paper Acceptance Rate 110 of 1,200 submissions, 9%;
Overall Acceptance Rate 1,133 of 8,635 submissions, 13%

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  • (2024)Decision Focused Causal Learning for Direct Counterfactual Marketing OptimizationProceedings of the 30th ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining10.1145/3637528.3672353(6368-6379)Online publication date: 25-Aug-2024
  • (2024)Temporal Uplift Modeling for Online MarketingProceedings of the 30th ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining10.1145/3637528.3671560(6247-6256)Online publication date: 25-Aug-2024
  • (2024)Spending Programmed Bidding: Privacy-friendly Bid Optimization with ROI Constraint in Online AdvertisingProceedings of the 30th ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining10.1145/3637528.3671540(5731-5740)Online publication date: 25-Aug-2024
  • (2024)CausalMMM: Learning Causal Structure for Marketing Mix ModelingProceedings of the 17th ACM International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining10.1145/3616855.3635766(238-246)Online publication date: 4-Mar-2024
  • (2024)Entire Chain Uplift Modeling with Context-Enhanced Learning for Intelligent MarketingCompanion Proceedings of the ACM Web Conference 202410.1145/3589335.3648320(226-234)Online publication date: 13-May-2024
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  • (2024)Robust portfolio optimization model for electronic coupon allocationINFOR: Information Systems and Operational Research10.1080/03155986.2024.238649462:4(646-660)Online publication date: 14-Aug-2024
  • (2023)Uplift Modeling: From Causal Inference to PersonalizationProceedings of the 32nd ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management10.1145/3583780.3615298(5212-5215)Online publication date: 21-Oct-2023
  • (2023)UniTE: A Unified Treatment Effect Estimation Method for One-sided and Two-sided MarketingProceedings of the 32nd ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management10.1145/3583780.3615100(1472-1481)Online publication date: 21-Oct-2023
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