Bidding Strategies for Display Advertising: How to Avoid Boiling the Ocean

Catherine Williams

On a real-time bidding (RTB) exchange like AppNexus, the strategy for direct-response advertising is simple: predict the expected revenue of each available impression, then bid that value. As the universe of web pages seeking RTB ads has grown, though, obtaining enough data to make predictions across sites is now so expensive as to be impossible for advertisers.