基于竞争关系建模,提升搜索广告点击单价的长期预测精度。
Competition-Aware CPC Forecasting with Near-Market Coverage
- 融合语义、行为与地理三类竞争信号构建预测特征。
- 短期预测(1周)误差降低15.1%,长期(6-12周)降幅超20%。
- 特别适用于高单价、高波动关键词,适合广告投放策略优化者。
付费搜索中的点击单价(CPC)由拍卖机制决定,其竞争环境对单个广告主而言仅部分可观测。基于2021-2023年谷歌广告16.6亿条日志数据,我们构建了覆盖1,811个关键词、持续127周的面板数据(共218,924个关键词-周观测值),并从关键词文本、CPC轨迹和地理市场结构中提取竞争感知代理变量。方法结合:(i) 基于预训练变换器的关键词语义邻域与语义图;(ii) 通过动态时间规整(DTW)对齐的CPC轨迹行为邻域;(iii) 反映局部需求与市场异质性的地理-意图协变量。将这些信号作为外生协变量或时空图模型中的关系先验,对比统计模型、神经网络及时间序列基础模型。结果揭示明显的时间窗交叉效应:在1周预测时,图模型误差最低,相比最强传统/机器学习基线降低sMAPE 15.1%;在6周和12周时,协变量增强的基础模型主导,分别降低sMAPE 22.5%和27.6%。增益集中于高CPC、高波动关键词,其预测误差代价最高。伪造检验支持竞争解释:语义竞争图比混淆匹配的非竞争图优4.05 sMAPE点,匹配邻居与时间打乱控制显示六周收益具有竞争特异性而非泛化平滑。整体成果确立了在部分可观测环境下,针对拍卖驱动广告市场的时序依赖竞争感知预测框架。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Cost-per-click (CPC) in paid search is an auction-generated outcome shaped by a competitive landscape that is only partially observable from any single advertiser's history. From 1.66 billion Google Ads log records for a concentrated car-rental market (2021-2023), we construct a weekly panel of 1,811 keyword series over 127 weeks (218,924 keyword-week observations) and build competition-aware proxies from keyword text, CPC trajectories, and geographic market structure. The design combines (i) semantic neighborhoods and a semantic keyword graph from pretrained transformer-based keyword representations, (ii) behavioral neighborhoods from Dynamic Time Warping (DTW) alignment of CPC trajectories, and (iii) geographic-intent covariates capturing localized demand and marketplace heterogeneity. We evaluate these signals both as exogenous covariates and as relational priors in spatiotemporal graph forecasters, benchmarking them against statistical, neural, and time-series foundation-model baselines. The results reveal a clear horizon crossover. At one week, graph-based models achieve the lowest error, reducing sMAPE by 15.1% relative to the strongest classical/ML baseline; at the six- and twelve-week horizons, covariate-augmented foundation models dominate, reducing sMAPE by 22.5% and 27.6%, respectively. The gains concentrate in the high-CPC, high-volatility keywords where forecasting errors are most costly. A falsification battery supports the competition interpretation at the planning horizon: the semantic competition graph outperforms a confounder-matched non-competitive graph by 4.05 sMAPE points, and matched-neighbour and time-shuffled controls show the six-week gains are competition-specific rather than generic smoothing. Together, the findings establish a horizon-dependent competition-aware forecasting design for auction-driven advertising markets under partial observability.
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