Click A, Buy B: Rethinking Conversion Attribution in E- Commerce Recommendations

User journeys in e-commerce routinely violate the one-to-one assumption that a clicked item on an advertising platform is the same item later purchased on the merchant's website/app. For a significant number of converting sessions on our platform, users click product A but buy product B -- the Click A, Buy B (CABB) phenomenon. Training recommendation models on raw click-conversion pairs therefore rewards items that merely correlate with purchases, leading to biased learning and sub-optimal conversion rates. We reframe conversion prediction as a multi-task problem with separate heads for Click A Buy A (CABA) and Click A Buy B (CABB). To isolate informative CABB conversions from unrelated CABB conversions, we introduce a taxonomy-aware collaborative filtering weighting scheme where each product is first mapped to a leaf node in a product taxonomy, and a category-to-category similarity matrix is learned from large-scale co-engagement logs. This weighting amplifies pairs that reflect genuine substitutable or complementary relations while down-weighting coincidental cross-category purchases. Offline evaluation on e-commerce sessions reduces normalized entropy by 13.9% versus a last-click attribution baseline. An online A/B test on live traffic shows +0.25% gains in the primary business metric.

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Publication Details

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ArXiv.org
Published
2025-07-20
Primary Topic
Recommender Systems and Techniques
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article
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article

Click A, Buy B: Rethinking Conversion Attribution in E- Commerce Recommendations

Kevin Huang, Jia Liu, Ankur Jain, Xiangyu Zeng et al.
ArXiv.org
Recommender Systems and Techniques
article

Click A, Buy B: Rethinking Conversion Attribution in E- Commerce Recommendations

Kevin Huang, Jia Liu, Ankur Jain, Xiangyu Zeng, Amit Jaspal, Goutham Panneeru, Nicolas Bievre, Mohit Jaggi, Prathap Maniraju
article en

Abstract

User journeys in e-commerce routinely violate the one-to-one assumption that a clicked item on an advertising platform is the same item later purchased on the merchant's website/app. For a significant number of converting sessions on our platform, users click product A but buy product B -- the Click A, Buy B (CABB) phenomenon. Training recommendation models on raw click-conversion pairs therefore rewards items that merely correlate with purchases, leading to biased learning and sub-optimal conversion rates. We reframe conversion prediction as a multi-task problem with separate heads for Click A Buy A (CABA) and Click A Buy B (CABB). To isolate informative CABB conversions from unrelated CABB conversions, we introduce a taxonomy-aware collaborative filtering weighting scheme where each product is first mapped to a leaf node in a product taxonomy, and a category-to-category similarity matrix is learned from large-scale co-engagement logs. This weighting amplifies pairs that reflect genuine substitutable or complementary relations while down-weighting coincidental cross-category purchases. Offline evaluation on e-commerce sessions reduces normalized entropy by 13.9% versus a last-click attribution baseline. An online A/B test on live traffic shows +0.25% gains in the primary business metric.

ArXiv.org
Openalex Percentile: Top 47%
Recommender Systems and Techniques
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Click A, Buy B: Rethinking Conversion Attribution in E- Commerce Recommendations — Kevin Huang, Jia Liu, et al. · ArXiv.org (2025) | TGRS Research Map | TGRS