Search

The aim of this paper is to optimize the allocation of multiple advertisements on a Web banner, where the price of an advertisement depends on the location at the banner. This problem can be defined as a two-dimensional single orthogonal knapsack problem with a location-based pixel-price model. A formulation is proposed in which the problem is specified as a 0–1 integer programming problem. As this problem is NP-complete, we mainly focus on a heuristic approach to solve the problem. We propose two new heuristic algorithms: the reactive GRASP algorithm and the partitioning left-justified algorithm. Next to that, we present an exact algorithm that is able to solve small problem instances in a reasonable time. These newly presented algorithms are compared with respect to efficiency and effectiveness to existing algorithms that solve the problem without a location-based pixel-price model. To test the quality of the algorithms, we have executed two experiments. The results of these experiments show that overall the reactive GRASP algorithm is the most effective algorithm, whereas the greedy stripping algorithm is the most efficient. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This work researches the drivers of e-commerce conversion of one of the largest e-commerce companies in the Netherlands. We focus on product page conversion, i.e., the probability that a customer who visits a specific product page also buys the product. This probability differs between products, which we explain by a variety of factors like pricing, delivery times, reviews, seller type, and the quality of the content. Understanding the drivers of conversion is the first step in increasing it, and therefore an important step in increasing overall sales. We describe the process of transforming Big Data into valuable insights using Bayesian statistics and apply a Bayesian Binomial model to a dataset of 15 million records using a distributed MCMC algorithm. In addition, we apply a simple Binomial GLM on a small sample of these 15 million records for comparison. We find that using the full 15 million records results in a significant reduction in the variance of the estimated parameters. In terms of the actual drivers of e-commerce conversion, we observe that products with competitive pricing, short delivery times, and good content all achieve a higher conversion on average. Furthermore, reviews, average review score, and the number of reviews for a product have a large positive effect on conversion compared to other characteristics. This provides a unique insight into what makes people decide whether or not to purchase a product. • We explain the drivers behind e-commerce conversion. • We transform Big Data into valuable insights using Bayesian statistics. • We use the consensus MCMC algorithm. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]