By Xibin Chen, Principal Data Scientist

The digital advertising industry is dynamic and versatile in terms of which KPIs measure the success of various campaigns. The KPIs vary from impression, click, viewability, brand lift to conversion. More and more campaigns contain multi-KPI goals. Besides optimizing each individual KPI for campaigns, the ShareThis RTB platform employs the data-driven multi-KPI optimization to meet various clients’ KPI goals.

1) Why – Multi-KPI Optimization

In addition to the delivery goal, these four KPIs are most important in the digital advertising world:

• CTR (Click-Through-Rate)
• Viewability
• CVR (Conversion Rate)
• Brand lift

None of these KPIs could replace each other. For example, we need to simultaneously optimize both CTR and viewability to meet 0.1% CTR and 75% viewability. It is unlikely to achieve both goals by only optimizing one of those two KPIs. Therefore, multi-KPI optimization is the solution to meet the multiple KPI goals.

2) How – Multi-KPI Optimization 

Multi-KPI optimization strives for multiple KPI goals at the same time by bidding a request based on the scores computed through the KPI scoring models. The flowchart of multi-KPI optimization is as follows:

3) What – Multi-KPI Optimization

There are two types of multiple KPI optimizations that can be used:

• Hard optimization: Bidding a request if their scores of multiple KPIs meet their threshold values, respectively. All requests scored in the yellow area in the following chart are bid in hard optimization.

• Soft optimization: Bidding a request if the weighted sum of scores meets the weighted threshold value. All requests scored in the yellow area and light blue areas in the following chart are bid in soft optimization.

Sometimes, hard optimization may cause delivery issues, while soft-optimization is more flexible. The bid areas are defined by the KPI threshold values and KPI priorities, or weights for all KPIs.

4) When – Multi-KPI Optimization

ShareThis, as a technology leader in ad platforms, has developed a sophisticated RTB platform incorporating a data-driven multi-KPI optimization engine. This platform has been proven to achieve the multi-KPI goals for various campaigns.

In this platform, multi-KPI optimization is an extension of each individual KPI optimization, i.e., an individual KPI optimization is a special case of the multi-KPI optimization. The ShareThis platform is capable of rapidly adapting the new KPIs into the multi-KPI optimization engine.