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Hauptverfasser: Weiss, Michael, Rosenbach, Robert, Eggenberger, Christian
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
Schlagworte:
Online-Zugang:https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.10377
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author Weiss, Michael
Rosenbach, Robert
Eggenberger, Christian
author_facet Weiss, Michael
Rosenbach, Robert
Eggenberger, Christian
contents Ranking product recommendations to optimize for a high click-through rate (CTR) or for high conversion, such as add-to-cart rate (ACR) and Order-Submit-Rate (OSR, view-to-purchase conversion) are standard practices in e-commerce. Optimizing for CTR appears like a straightforward choice: Training data (i.e., click data) are simple to collect and often available in large quantities. Additionally, CTR is used far beyond e-commerce, making it a generalist, easily implemented option. ACR and OSR, on the other hand, are more directly linked to a shop's business goals, such as the Gross Merchandise Value (GMV). In this paper, we compare the effects of using either of these objectives using an online A/B test. Among our key findings, we demonstrate that in our shops, optimizing for OSR produces a GMV uplift more than five times larger than when optimizing for CTR, without sacrificing new product discovery. Our results also provide insights into the different feature importances for each of the objectives.
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id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2508_10377
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Clicks Versus Conversion: Choosing a Recommender's Training Objective in E-Commerce
Weiss, Michael
Rosenbach, Robert
Eggenberger, Christian
Information Retrieval
Machine Learning
Ranking product recommendations to optimize for a high click-through rate (CTR) or for high conversion, such as add-to-cart rate (ACR) and Order-Submit-Rate (OSR, view-to-purchase conversion) are standard practices in e-commerce. Optimizing for CTR appears like a straightforward choice: Training data (i.e., click data) are simple to collect and often available in large quantities. Additionally, CTR is used far beyond e-commerce, making it a generalist, easily implemented option. ACR and OSR, on the other hand, are more directly linked to a shop's business goals, such as the Gross Merchandise Value (GMV). In this paper, we compare the effects of using either of these objectives using an online A/B test. Among our key findings, we demonstrate that in our shops, optimizing for OSR produces a GMV uplift more than five times larger than when optimizing for CTR, without sacrificing new product discovery. Our results also provide insights into the different feature importances for each of the objectives.
title Clicks Versus Conversion: Choosing a Recommender's Training Objective in E-Commerce
topic Information Retrieval
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.10377