The present invention is directed towards systems and method for generating a bid amount for one or more keywords for a display of an advertisement associated with a given keyword. The method comprises calculating estimates of one or more advertising metrics for one or more keywords associated with one or more advertisements displayed at one or more positions. Target positions are identified for the one or more keywords at which a return on investment earned by the display of one or more advertisements in response to a query that matches a given keyword exceeds a threshold by a given probability on the basis of the estimates to select a given target position that provides a greatest estimated profit. Bid amounts are generated for the one or more keywords in order to obtain the display of associated advertisements at the given target position.