Skip to main content

Please enter a keyword and click the arrow to search the site

Cost-per-Click Pricing for Display Advertising

Journal

Manufacturing & Service Operations Management

Subject

Management Science and Operations

Authors / Editors

Najafi-Asadolahi S;Fridgeirsdottir K

Publication Year

2014

Abstract

Display advertising is a $25 billion business with a promising upward revenue trend. In this paper, we consider an online display advertising setting in which a web publisher posts display ads on its website and charges based on the cost-per-click (CPC) pricing scheme while promising to deliver a certain number of clicks to the ads posted. The publisher is faced with uncertain demand for advertising slots and uncertain traffic to its website as well as uncertain click behavior of visitors. We formulate the problem as a novel queueing system, where the slots correspond to service channels with the service rate of each server inversely related to the number of active servers. We obtain the closed-form solution for the steady-state probabilities of the number of ads in the publisher's system. We determine the publisher's optimal price to charge per click and show that it can increase in the number of advertising slots and the number of promised clicks. We show that the common heuristic used by many web publishers to convert between the cost-per-click and cost-per-impression pricing schemes using the so-called click-through-rate can be misleading as it may incur web publishers substantial revenue loss. We provide an alternative explanation for the phenomenon observed by several publishers that the click-through-rate tends to drop when they switch from the cost-per-click to cost-per-impression pricing scheme.

Keywords

Queueing Systems; Online Advertising; Pricing; Markov Chains; Cost-Per-Click

Available on ECCH

No


Select up to 4 programmes to compare

Select one more to compare
×
subscribe_image_desktop 5949B9BFE33243D782D1C7A17E3345D0

Sign up to receive our latest news and business thinking direct to your inbox

×

Sign up to receive our latest course information and business thinking

Leave your details above if you would like to receive emails containing the latest thought leadership, invitations to events and news about courses that could enhance your career. If you would prefer not to receive our emails, you can still access the case study by clicking the button below. You can opt-out of receiving our emails at any time by visiting: https://london.edu/my-profile-preferences or by unsubscribing through the link provided in our emails. View our Privacy Policy for more information on your rights.