# Constrained user-item allocation for e-commerce marketing campaigns Source: [Constrained user-item allocation for e-commerce marketing campaigns]() Collection index: [llms.txt]() Data updated: 2026-06-10T05:15:22.625Z Authors: Maja Lindstr\\"om, Natalija Glisovic, Jan von Pichowski, Tommy L\\"ofstedt, Martin Rosvall Published: 2026-06-08T15:26:14.000Z ## Abstract When running marketing campaigns, retailers must decide which products to promote and which users to target. These decisions are inherently coupled: effective campaigns match users and items with strong mutual affinity into non-overlapping groups of predefined sizes. However, existing approaches assume predefined campaign structure or decouple item selection from user assignment, and cannot discover campaign groupings directly from joint interaction patterns. We therefore formalize this campaign problem as auto-targeting: jointly selecting users and items to construct multiple disjoint campaigns. To solve this combinatorial problem, we propose three complementary strategies: (i) constrained spectral biclustering to find dense regions in the user-item affinity matrix, (ii) greedy local search with pairwise swaps for combinatorial refinement, and (iii) a multi-armed bandit framework to escape local optima through exploration. We evaluate these methods on a synthetic dataset, the Amazon Reviews benchmarks, and large-scale proprietary commercial data, and compare the results to simulated annealing as a baseline. The results show that biclustering consistently achieves the highest campaign quality, lift, and fairness scores. While biclustering runs efficiently on smaller datasets, its runtime increases substantially on very large ones, where bandit-based methods instead offer a scalable alternative. ## Recorded benchmark results A research result applies to its stated dataset, split, metric and evaluation configuration. Compare like-for-like settings, preserve the metric's unit and direction, and distinguish paper-reported results from independent reproduction. The best result recorded here is not a claim of exhaustive, current global coverage. - [Campaign Assignment on IKEA](): Campaign Assignment; IKEA; Lift: 2.32. - [Campaign Assignment on Baby Products](): Campaign Assignment; Baby Products; Lift: 176. - [Campaign Assignment on Musical Instruments](): Campaign Assignment; Musical Instruments; Lift: 152. - [Campaign Assignment on Interior Design](): Campaign Assignment; Interior Design; Lift: 183. - [Campaign Assignment on Baby Products (Runtime)](): Campaign Assignment; Baby Products; Runtime: 5.1. - [Runtime on Musical Instruments](): Campaign Assignment; Musical Instruments; Runtime: 45. - [Campaign Assignment on Interior Design (Runtime)](): Campaign Assignment; Interior Design; Runtime: 54.6. ## Original sources and implementation [Original paper]() [PDF]()