Patent Application
20100082808
The present invention relates generally to Internet applications, and, more particularly, to a system and method for automatically delivering relevant Internet contents.
In delivering web pages through the Internet, there are a number of techniques used to monitor which pages a user visits and what a user does on a webpage. A pixel tag, also called a web bug or a web beacon, is one of the techniques often used to track who is reading a webpage or email, when, and from what computer. A pixel tag can also be used to see if an e-mail was read or forwarded to other addresses. Many webpages are not self-contained within their own websites. They may refer to content from other websites or servers. When a web browser prepares such a webpage for display, a request is automatically sent to other web sites and servers for the additional content, These requests typically include an IP address of the requesting computer, a time the content was requested, a type of web browser that made the request, and the existence of cookies previously set by the server. The server can store all of this information, and associate it with a unique tracking token attached to the content request.
As an example of the way pixel tags can make user logging easier, consider a company that owns a network of sites. This company may have a network that requires all images to be stored on one host computer while the pages themselves are stored elsewhere. They could use pixel tags to count and recognize users traveling around the different servers on the network. Rather than gathering statistics and managing cookies on all their servers separately, they can use pixel tags to keep them all together.
A pixel tag typically generates a request for a transparent graphic image, usually 1 pixel×1 pixel, or for a Java script, which is placed in a source file of the webpage and is used to monitor the behavior of the user visiting the Web site. For example, the following are two pixel tags recently found on People magazine online and LA Times pages represented as HTML IMG tags:
img src=‘http://pixel.quantserve.comlpixellp-5dyPa639Irglw.gif?tags=News’
style=‘display: none;’ border=‘O’ height=‘1’ width=‘1’,
http://pixeI1739.everesttech.nel/1739/p?ev_transid=122233805919528058309&ev_La times.com˜business_sCpageview=1
These pixel tags are placed on the home page of People Magazine and on the Business section page of LA Times, respectively, to provide “hit” information about visitors to Quantcast and Efficient Frontier, Internet analytics and campaign optimization companies. The specific information that the pixel calls provides to an advertisement network or to the analytics company is hardcoded into the pixel tag as is seen in these two examples. When a browser interprets a pixel tag, the browser is caused to automatically send a request to a server defined in the pixel tag and communicate the information pertaining to the page or a site (e.g. tags=“News” or “business” in these examples).
However, editing these pixel tags could be tedious and costly. In particular, when the data sent with the pixel tag includes some specific information about the page or group of pages, e.g. the topic or ‘channel’ this page represents. Each time the pixel is edited, added or changed, the webpage has to be redesigned. Continued the above example of the People Magazine or LA Times pages, the two pixel tags must be rewritten if, for example, the attribution of the page changes from News to Sports; both the attribution and the editing have to be done by the Publisher and communicated to the data receiving entity. Given so many webpages on a website, it would be prohibitively expensive to rewrite the pages, add a pixel tag to every new page requires prior knowledge of the attributes of the page as well as edit a pixel to include these attributes.
As such, what is desired is a system and method that will not require rewriting or editing the pixel tags when there is a need to change the attributes of the pages or to cover new pages.
This invention discloses a system and method for automatically delivering relevant Internet content to a browser. The Internet content delivering system comprises a webpage embedded with a generic pixel tag stored in a first server, the generic pixel tag being configured to cause a retrieval of at least one predetermined attribute of the webpage from a browser that is viewing the webpage; and a rule engine residing in a second server for determining one or more Internet contents based on the predetermined attribute for being sent to the browser, wherein linkages between the webpage and the one or more Internet contents are not hard coded in the webpage.
The method for automatically delivering relevant Internet contents comprises releasing a webpage embedded with a generic pixel tag by a first server to a browser; obtaining at least one predetermined attribute of the webpage through an execution of the generic pixel tag on the browser; sending the predetermined attribute to a rule engine residing in a second server for determining one or more category information of the webpage; and releasing one or more Internet contents appropriate to the one or more category information to the browser, wherein linkages between the webpage and the one or more Internet contents are not hard coded in the webpage.
The construction and method of operation of the invention, however, together with additional objectives and advantages thereof will be best understood from the following description of specific embodiments when read in connection with the accompanying drawings.
The drawings accompanying and forming part of this specification are included to depict certain aspects of the invention. A clearer conception of the invention, and of the components and operation of systems provided with the invention, will become more readily apparent by referring to the exemplary, and therefore non-limiting, embodiments illustrated in the drawings, wherein like reference numbers (if they occur in more than one view) designate the same elements. The invention may be better understood by reference to one or more of these drawings in combination with the description presented herein.
The present invention discloses a system and method for automatically delivering relevant Internet content by utilizing generic pixel tags embedded in webpages, so that when attributes of the webpage need to be changed, the generic pixel tag need not be modified.
The event qualification engine 304 is provided to qualify or categorize the webpage viewed by the user by dynamically analyzing predetermined attribute pertaining to the webpage. The event qualification engine 304 qualifies the webpage per a finite number of categories, each related to one type of user interest or other user attribute, such as demographics, psychographics, or geographic location. For example, a user browsing websites featuring Ford or Toyota cars indicate that the user is now interested in automobiles, and thus the user browsing event is qualified into a “car” category.
As an example, the event qualification engine 304 includes an exact map module 306, a rule module 308 and a rule-free module 310. The exact map module 306 provides an exact matching between a received webpage URL and one of the categories, namely each category corresponds to one or more URLs (e.g. http://www.cnn.com/TECH/ is attributed to Technology-News category). The rule module 308 provides definitive matching rules between a category and a set of URLs from a domain. In one example, there is a plurality of categories, each corresponding to one or more URLs. In another example, one rule may correspond to a number of pages whose URL's do not have to be known in advance, e.g., any page from the domain www.retailer.com whose URL contains 12a4 pattern is attributed to a category of Plasma TV. The rule-free module 310 uses rule-free attributes, for example, text-based page classification.
The set of attribution designs thus covers essentially any webpage, is executed dynamically, and does not involve any work on the part of the Publisher. Any change in the content of the page or in the dictionary of attributes does not lead to any additional work as they are automatically detected and determined by the underlying rules in the event qualification engine 304.
A user modeler 320 receives the webpage category and is configured to determine interest categories of the user that is viewing the webpage. In operation, the user modeler 320 receives the webpage categories for webpages viewed by the user from the event qualification engine 304 and transforms them into meaningful interest categories of the user—an interest model. In one case, an interest model comprises a user's unique demographics, geographic location, lifestyle, as well as quantified expressions of purchase intent for various products or services that may be categorized. Once the interest model is constructed, it is continuously updated and enhanced as new user click-stream data becomes available.
An interest model of a user may include one or more intent categories depending on the intent of the user for various products or services. If the user spends a significant amount of time browsing websites featuring a certain item (e.g., cars), the analysis of the data traffic may indicate that the current interest of the user is focusing on the item. If there is a category for the item, the interest model of the user now includes the category. Depending on the interests of the user, the interest model of the user may contain several intent categories, each is being weighted differently. A number may be assigned to a category in the interest model. The number may be updated over time. For a category, in general, the higher a number, the more likely a product or service corresponding to the category is attended to by the user.
Once the user interest categories are evaluated, there are many applications that can utilize the interests. For instance, a targeted advertisement based on the user interest, instead of a generic one, may be sent to the browser for display. The user modeler 320 can be part of the rule engine 212 or separated from the rule engine 212 and even reside in another server.
Again, the optimizer 340 utilizes a user interest model to work with an advertisement server 206 to select the most relevant advertisement content for a user. The optimizer 340 gets current user interest model from the user modeler 320. The optimizer 340 also maintains an up-to-date copy of the available advertisement contents of the advertisement server 206 as well as corresponding attributes, constraints, and rules of usage for each of these advertisement contents 342. In one case this is achieved through metadata synchronization between the advertisement server 206 and the optimizer 340. The optimizer 340 can be part of the rule engine 212 or separated from the rule engine 212 and even reside in another server.
When the advertisement server 206 receives a browser request for an advertisement content (an ad call) resulting from a user's request of a webpage on which the webpage publisher wants to display advertisement content, the advertisement server 206 relays this ad call request to the optimizer 340. The optimizer 340 then calls the user modeler 320 and receives the current interest model of the user. Upon receiving the interest model of the user, the optimizer selects an advertisement content the most appropriate for the categories of interest of the user and other attributes of the ad call (e.g., time of the call, type of webpage on which advertisement content should be placed, etc). Finally, the optimizer 340 communicates to the advertisement server 206 which particular advertisement content has been chosen.
In one case, given a certain user interest model, the optimizer 340 first considers all advertisement contents available in advertisement sever 206 and eliminates those for which the categories of interest of the user and other attributes of the advertisement call do not meet advertisement contents' constraints and rules of usage. For the remaining advertising contents, the optimizer 340 calculates a predicted response from the user to the advertisement content (likelihood of a click or conversion) based on the interest model of the user and other attributes of the advertisement call. With the predicted response and the rates paid by the advertisers for showing their advertisement contents, the optimizer 340 calculates projected revenue for each of the advertisement contents that could be generated from this advertisement call. Finally, the optimizer 340 selects the advertisement content with the highest projected revenue and passes the winning advertisement content identifier to the advertisement server 206.
The present invention is preferably implemented by software or a combination of hardware and software, but can also be implemented in hardware.
The present invention can also be embodied as computer readable code on a computer readable medium. The computer readable medium is any data storage device that can store data which can thereafter be read by a computer system. Examples of the computer readable medium include read-only memory, random-access memory, CD-ROMs, DVDs, magnetic tape, optical data storage devices, and carrier waves. The computer readable medium can also be distributed over network-coupled computer systems so that the computer readable code is stored and executed in a distributed fashion.
The above illustration provides many different embodiments or embodiments for implementing different features of the invention. Specific embodiments of components and processes are described to help clarify the invention. These are, of course, merely embodiments and are not intended to limit the invention from that described in the claims.
Although the invention is illustrated and described herein as embodied in one or more specific examples, it is nevertheless not intended to be limited to the details shown, since various modifications and structural changes may be made therein without departing from the spirit of the invention and within the scope and range of equivalents of the claims. Accordingly, it is appropriate that the appended claims be construed broadly and in a manner consistent with the scope of the invention, as set forth in the following claims.
This application claims the benefits of U.S. Provisional Patent Application Ser. No. 61/101,150, which was filed on Sep. 29, 2008 and entitled “Generic pixel tags”.
| Number | Date | Country | |
|---|---|---|---|
| 61101150 | Sep 2008 | US |
