AI RESEARCH
Competition-Aware CPC Forecasting with Near-Market Coverage
arXiv CS.AI
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ArXi:2603.13059v1 Announce Type: cross Cost-per-click (CPC) in paid search is a volatile auction outcome generated by a competitive landscape that is only partially observable from any single advertiser's history. Using Google Ads auction logs from a concentrated car-rental market (2021--2023), we forecast weekly CPC for 1,811 keyword series and approximate latent competition through complementary signals derived from keyword text, CPC trajectories, and geographic market structure.