2006 Final Competition Snapshot

HEADLINES

Congratulations to all who participated in the Bidding agent competition. I hope that you had a fun time, and didn't lose too much sleep! The competition was a cliff-hanger right up until the end. This email will serve to provide a recap of the competition, the teams, and the results, and will finally announce the final places.

AND THE WINNERS ARE….!

Place	Team	Affiliation	% Increase in Clicks compared to Historical	Budget Remaining at End of Competition
1	Maxon	FH GelsenKirchen	67%	0%
2	MichaelO	Stanford	33%	0%
3	Blue Reason	U. Michigan	26%	26%
4	Blackteam	Unidentified	-2%	0%
5	DGGSS	Indian Institute of Science	-3%	0%
6	Control	Control group	-3%	0%
7	Meech	Unidentified	-18%	0%
8	TERPS	U. Maryland	-25%	0%
9	Adieu	Brown U.	-25%	10%
10	Dimbleby	U. British Columbia	-28%	55%
11	Team Panda	U. Pennsylvania	-40%	0%
12	UT Austin	U. Texas Austin	-53%	65%

COMPETITORS - PLEASE DOCUMENT YOUR STRATEGIES !

We are interested in documenting the strategies that each team used in a short competition report. We’re hoping to provide each team with 1-2 pages to write up their strategy, with an introduction section that will talk about the game. We are going to try to get author names included, so that the short sections are listed in the table of contents. Please stay tuned for further instructions on this, but you might want to get a head start by writing down your strategy, what happened, and what went according to plan, while this is still fresh in your memory!

COMPETITION OBJECTIVES AND BUDGET

The objective of the game was to maximize the percentage increase in the clicks of keywords in each account, compared to the same keywords from May 1-31. Each team was assigned keywords randomly from the parent account. Budgets were equal to the average spend for the keywords received between May 1-31. .

 Budgets were equal to the average daily spend from the keywords in the account between May 1-31 2006. This meant that each team had a different budget. The budgets ranged between $2.22 and $60.20.

 Each team had to use their budget judiciously to buy clicks without over-spending. The competition organizers monitored team progress on AdCenter’s back-end database, and reports produced whenever new data became available. Each time new data appeared, we calculated the difference in spend between 00:00 and hours following, and if this spend exceeded the competitor’s budget, then their account was considered "stopped". The hour in which the team dipped into negative budget territory was excluded from click counting. Because of reporting delays, it was possible to not find out that an account was shut down until several hours after the event, but we were always able to see the hour in which this occurred and so calculate scores appropriately..

The competition opened at 00:00 Tuesday June 12th and closed at 23:59pm on June 12th 2006. Unspent budget was lost and did not factor into the success of the account.

 THE FINAL HOURS

In the final 6 hours, MichaelO had exhausted is revenues and was in free fall. Blue Reason had 28% of budget left and was looking to convert that into clicks and come up from third place. Adieu and Dimbleby were also looking to spend their excess revenues. Maxon continued to power ahead, spending its budget by about 8pm but picking up an additional 6 clicks. Blue Reason only picked up 2 clicks and finished the game with unused cash. Dimbleby and Adieu both had difficulty converting their cash into clicks in the final 6 hours. 

FINAL GRAPHS

COMPETITION DATA

Aggregated team performance data is available from http://www.biddingagentcompetition.com/downloads.html

THANKYOU TO ADCENTER

It has been a great pleasure to be able to run this competition, and I want to thank you for the opportunity. The competition was supported by a large team of talented individuals at Microsoft AdCenter who did an amazing job. I would like to thank the following individuals in particular for their superb efforts and immense assistance over the course of the competition: