ing order is used for the research approach descrip-
tion: Domain Understanding, Data Understanding,
Data Preparation, Modeling, and Results (evaluation).
The last, deployment, phase of the CRISP-DM will be
absent as this paper is an exploitative research without
an implementation.
4.1 Domain Understanding
Two parties can be distinguished in the process of
serving an ad in a mobile device context (see Fig-
ure 2). First the one which provides the ad, the ad-
vertiser, and second, the party that offers an ad space
in an application or site, the publisher. However, be-
tween the advertiser and the publisher are two service
parties that make sure the ad is served in the right
space, the bidding service and the auction service.
When an advertiser is going to use mobile adver-
tising, the ad needs to be served in mobile contexts.
Before a mobile ad, or impression, is served in a mo-
bile application or mobile website, a Real-Time Bid-
ding (RTB) process is performed. The Interactive Ad-
vertising Bureau (IAB) creates and maintains stan-
dards and specifications in order to improve the ad
network landscape and describes RTB as bidding for
individual impressions in real-time (IAB Nederland,
2014).
The advertiser is not directly involved in the auc-
tion, but is outsourcing the bidding process to a ser-
vice on the Demand-Side Platform (DSP). Companies
on the DSP compete in auctions to obtain an unique
impression. This means that the advertiser is waiting
until the auction for one unique banner is finished in
order to serve an ad (IAB Nederland, 2014). The auc-
tion is finished when the highest bidder is determined.
The decisions made regarding the participation in the
auction and its result is based on computer algorithms,
so there is no direct human input required (Yuan et al.,
2013).
On the other hand, opposite to the advertiser and
the DSP, are the publisher that offers the impressions,
and the Supply-Side Platform (SSP) that conducts an
auction among bidders on the DSP per impression.
4.2 Data Understanding
The data used in the research is made available by a
company operating in the Dutch mobile advertising
landscape, Mobile Professionals (MobPro). MobPro
has build its own bidding server in order to participate
in the RTB process. MobPro is mostly operating on a
DSP. The data that is needed for this research is a re-
sult of three types of information: i) bid request infor-
mation, ii) design characteristics, and iii) engagement
information.
First, each impression has information that was
generated during the RTB process consisting of infor-
mation about the context of the prospective impres-
sion, such as the location of the user and device spec-
ifications. This information is stored in the (1) ‘auc-
tion’ table in Google BigQuery. BigQuery enables us
to perform SQL-queries for data analyses. Second,
some visual information is available of the ad that
is shown during the impression, (2) the ‘view’ table.
These are the design characteristics. The ad is only
considered an impression when the design character-
istics, specified by the advertiser and the designer,
meet the specifications of the request. It is only pos-
sible that a certain design is shown to a user if the
design fits the available ad space. Finally, data that
is generated during the impression is stored in the (3)
‘click’ or ‘event’ table. This is the actual data about
how the ad is perceived by the user and contains in-
formation about an engagement. The first two cate-
gories are constructing the independent variables, the
last one forms the dependent variables.
4.3 Data Preparation
MobPro uses a system to store information about all
the incoming bid requests. A bid request is the call
from the bidding servers that an ad space is available.
The data used in this research is only containing won
bid requests, since only the bids that are won can be
filled with an ad. This means that an incoming bid
request is accepted, bid on, and the bid is won ac-
cording to the highest bid respectively. This process
takes place in the RTB process explained earlier.
Due to the large amount of data the dataset is that
is used is reduced to limit number of bid request.
First, we are using the auction data table (the incom-
ing bid requests) of one day (2017-01-26). Since we
are only interested in the ads that were actually view-
able to users, the auction table is combined with the
table containing the views. Joining the auction table
and the view table results in a table with 3.16 million
won bids on that day. In this step, for ad format and
medium type, the design characteristics are directly
filtered from the auction table. This means that the
total numbers of views can differ per dataset for each
hypotheses. Overall, the number of viewable ads was
more than one million.
In the next step a distinction was made between
the characteristics. For the creative attributes and
brand visibility a list with campaigns was manually
checked to assign the right value for each ad (N =
151). This means that each ad was checked and cat-
egorized for with the right characteristic. Since each