Payments in online ad auctions are typically derived from click-through rates, so that advertisers do not pay for ineffective ads. But advertisers often care about more than just clicks. That is, for example, if they aim to raise brand awareness or visibility. There is thus an opportunity to devise a more effective ad pricing paradigm, in which ads are paid only if they are actually noticed. This article contributes a novel auction format based on a pay-per-attention (PPA) scheme. We show that the PPA auction inherits the desirable properties (strategy-proofness and efficiency) as its pay-per-impression and pay-per-click counterparts, and that it also compares favourably in terms of revenues. To make the PPA format feasible, we also contribute a scalable diagnostic technology to predict user attention to ads in sponsored search using raw mouse cursor coordinates only, regardless of the page content and structure. We use the user attention predictions in numerical simulations to evaluate the PPA auction scheme. Our results show that, in relevant economic settings, the PPA revenues would be strictly higher than the existing auction payment schemes.

中文翻译：

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使用鼠标光标信息的按注意价格拍卖方案

在线广告拍卖中的付款通常来自点击率，因此广告商不会为无效的广告付费。但广告商通常关心的不仅仅是点击次数。也就是说，例如，如果他们旨在提高品牌知名度或知名度。因此，有机会设计一种更有效的广告定价模式，其中只有当广告真正被注意到时才会付费。本文提供了一种基于按次付费 (PPA) 方案的新颖拍卖格式。我们表明，PPA 拍卖继承了其按印象付费和按点击付费的理想属性（策略证明性和效率），并且在收入方面也具有优势。为了使 PPA 格式可行，我们还提供了一种可扩展的诊断技术，以仅使用原始鼠标光标坐标来预测用户对赞助搜索广告的关注度，而不管页面内容和结构如何。我们在数值模拟中使用用户注意力预测来评估 PPA 拍卖方案。我们的结果表明，在相关经济环境下，购电协议的收入将严格高于现有的拍卖支付计划。