Budget smoothing in a messaging platform

A non-transitory computer-readable storage medium comprising instructions that, when executed by a system comprising one or more computer processors, cause the system to:

• identify a set of one or more candidate messages, each candidate message in the set being associated with a bid price and one of a plurality of ad campaigns;
• construct an engagement time distribution by at least applying a first spend smoothing distribution to a first tunable parameter to generate a first product, applying a second spend smoothing distribution to a second tunable parameter to generate a second product, and combining the first product and the second product;
• receive, from a client device, a request for a message stream of an account holder of a social media platform, the social media platform publishing message streams of account holders;
• for each of the plurality of ad campaigns:
• access the engagement time distribution,
• calculate a set of two or more parameters comprising a predicted click-through rate and one or more of an impression callback rate and a cost per engagement, wherein the predicted click-through rate is calculated based on a features vector and a weights vector, wherein the features vector comprises values of one or more of a message feature or an account feature, and wherein the weights vector comprises weight values for each of the features in the features vector,
• calculate a current outstanding spend based on a time stamp of the request, the set of two or more parameters, the engagement time distribution, and the one or more candidate messages in the set that are associated with the respective ad campaign that have been included in message streams of one or more account holders of the social media platform and that have not received engagements,
• calculate a total outstanding spend for the respective ad campaign by adding the current outstanding spend of the respective ad campaign to a current spend of the respective ad campaign, and
• derive a throttle factor based on the time stamp and a current budget spend rate;
• determine, for only each of the candidate messages in the set associated with a respective ad campaign having the total outstanding spend less than a budget for the respective ad campaign, a rank value based on the bid price of the respective candidate message, the throttle factor for the respective ad campaign, and a value representing a likelihood of engagement with the respective candidate message by the account holder;
• select at least one of the candidate messages in the set for inclusion in the requested message stream of the account holder based on the respective rank values;
• and
• send the message stream to the client device for display.

A system comprising:

• a computing system comprising one or more computer processors;
• and
• a memory, wherein the memory includes instructions that, when executed by the computing system, cause the computing system to:
• identify a set of one or more candidate messages, each candidate message in the set being associated with a bid price and one of a plurality of ad campaigns;
• construct an engagement time distribution by at least applying a first spend smoothing distribution to a first tunable parameter to generate a first product, applying a second spend smoothing distribution to a second tunable parameter to generate a second product, and combining the first product and the second product;
• receive, from a client device, a request for a message stream of an account holder of a social media platform, the social media platform publishing message streams of account holders;
• for each of the plurality of ad campaigns:
• access the engagement time distribution,
• calculate a set of two or more parameters comprising a predicted click-through rate and one or more of an impression callback rate and a cost per engagement, wherein the predicted click-through rate is calculated based on a features vector and a weights vector, wherein the features vector comprises values of one or more of a message feature or an account feature, and wherein the weights vector comprises weight values for each of the features in the features vector,
• calculate a current outstanding spend based on a time stamp of the request, the set of two or more parameters, the engagement time distribution, and the one or more candidate messages in the set that are associated with the respective ad campaign that have been included in message streams of one or more account holders of the social media platform and that have not received engagements,
• calculate a total outstanding spend for the respective ad campaign by adding the current outstanding spend of the respective ad campaign to a current spend of the respective ad campaign;
• and
• derive a throttle factor based on the time stamp and a current budget spend rate;
• determine, for only each of the candidate messages in the set associated with a respective ad campaign having the total outstanding spend less than a budget for the respective ad campaign, a rank value based on the bid price of the respective candidate message, the throttle factor for the respective ad campaign, and a value representing a likelihood of engagement with the respective candidate message by the account holder;
• select at least one of the candidate messages in the set for inclusion in the requested message stream of the account holder based on the respective rank values;
• and
• send the message stream to the client device for display.