2011 Wagner Prize Finalist - The University of Texas at Dallas & Texas A&M University

To Show or Not To Show: Using User Profiling to Manage Internet Advertisement Campaigns at Chitika

We study the problem of an internet ad firm (www.chitika.com) that needs to maximize its ad revenue subject to a click-through-rate constraint imposed by a publisher. The solution combines real-time data and decision analytics, namely, predicting the likelihood of a visitor's click event for a given ad, followed by a filter to decide whether or not to show the ad to the visitor. The approach has significantly boosted ad revenue as well as provided a competitive advantage for the company to enter new markets.