Title: You Must Have Clicked on this Ad by Mistake! Data-Driven Identification of Accidental Clicks on Mobile Ads with Applications to Advertiser Cost Discounting and Click-Through Rate Prediction,
Abstract: In the cost per click (CPC) pricing model, an advertiser pays an ad network
only when a user clicks on an ad; in turn, the ad network gives a share of that
revenue to the publisher where the ad was impressed. Still, advertisers may be
unsatisfied with ad networks charging them for "valueless" clicks, or so-called
accidental clicks. [...] Charging advertisers for such clicks is detrimental in
the long term as the advertiser may decide to run their campaigns on other ad
networks. In addition, machine-learned click models trained to predict which ad
will bring the highest revenue may overestimate an ad click-through rate, and
as a consequence negatively impacting revenue for both the ad network and the
publisher. In this work, we propose a data-driven method to detect accidental
clicks from the perspective of the ad network. We collect observations of time
spent by users on a large set of ad landing pages - i.e., dwell time. We notice
that the majority of per-ad distributions of dwell time fit to a mixture of
distributions, where each component may correspond to a particular type of
clicks, the first one being accidental. We then estimate dwell time thresholds
of accidental clicks from that component. Using our method to identify
accidental clicks, we then propose a technique that smoothly discounts the
advertiser's cost of accidental clicks at billing time. Experiments conducted
on a large dataset of ads served on Yahoo mobile apps confirm that our
thresholds are stable over time, and revenue loss in the short term is
marginal. We also compare the performance of an existing machine-learned click
model trained on all ad clicks with that of the same model trained only on
non-accidental clicks. There, we observe an increase in both ad click-through
rate (+3.9%) and revenue (+0.2%) on ads served by the Yahoo Gemini network when
using the latter. [...]