The invention relates generally to computer systems, and more particularly to an improved system and method for using contextual sections of web page content for serving advertisements in online advertising.
Operators of websites offering online content may manage an inventory of advertisements that may be shown to visitors viewing content of a website. When a user may visit a website, the operator of the website or a third party may choose to show one or more advertisements to the user with the expectation that the user may select an advertisement to buy advertised goods or services. Advertisers may bid to have their advertisement shown to a visitor viewing particular content of the website. Or the operator of the website or third party may choose the advertisement and may generate revenue whenever a visitor may select an advertisement shown while viewing content of the website.
Most current approaches for choosing advertisements that match the content of a requested web page may consider how well the advertisements may match the topic of the content of the web page. Typically, a web crawler would crawl the web page offline and extract features such as keywords for the web page. The features may be stored in an index with the Uniform Resource Locator (URL). Then when a web page was fetched, the features may be used to select an advertisement. Unfortunately, there are web pages users visit which are not crawled. For example, there may be web pages newly created by a publisher that may not yet be crawled. These pages would not have features stored in an index that may be used for selecting an advertisement. There may also be pages like a user login page that receives user input online, and, therefore, such web pages cannot be crawled offline. Other examples include news websites, personalized content, and other content feeds with newly created content. For newly created or dynamically created web pages, there needs to be better optimization in matching advertisements to web pages to reflect the context of the web page content. The communication and latency costs for analyzing the entire web page in real-time are prohibitive. Text summarization techniques have been applied to reduce the overhead of communication and latency costs for dynamic web page content. See for example, Aris Anagnostopoulos, Andrei Z. Broder, Evgeniy Gabrilovich, Vanja Josifovski, and Lance Riedel, Just-in-time Contextual Advertising, CIKM'07, Nov. 6-8, 2007, Lisboa, Portugal.
What is needed is a way to provide more accurate contextual targeting in serving advertisements in online advertising. Such a system and method should protect privacy information, financial information, or other personally identifiable information, yet improve the user experience and increase revenue for advertisers and website operators.
Briefly, the present invention provides a system and method for using contextual sections of web page content for serving advertisements in online advertising. A content extractor operably coupled to a web brower may be provided for extracting content sections of a web page marked for selectively matching advertisements for display to a user. Extracted content sections may sent in various embodiments to an advertisement serving engine that may include a feature extractor for identifying features in the marked content sections of the web page. The advertisement serving engine may also include an advertisement matching engine operably coupled to the feature extractor for selecting advertisements by matching features from the content sections of the web page with the features designated by advertisers for advertisements. Advertisements matching the extracted content may be served for display with the web page.
In general, a publisher may use a tool to identify sections of a web page that represent content to be used in contextual advertising. When rendered by a web browser, content from marked sections may be extracted from the web page and sent to an advertisement server for selectively matching advertisements for display to a user. Features may be identified from the content sections and used to select advertisements matching the extracted content of the web page. In particular, the features identified from the content sections may be matched with features designated by advertisers for advertisements. Web page placements may be allocated for advertisements matching the extracted content, and the advertisements may be served for display with the web page.
The present invention may support many applications that may serve advertisements using contextual sections of web page content in online advertising. For example, online content publishing applications may use the present invention to select a list of advertisements that match the contextual sections of web page content for display with content requested by a user. Similarly, ecommerce applications may use the present invention to select a list of advertisements that match the contextual sections of product information on a web page requested by a user. Or online search advertising applications may use the present invention to select a list of advertisements that match the contextual sections of a web page in search results requested by a user. For any of these online applications, the contextual sections of web page content may be used for more accurate contextual targeting in serving advertisements in online advertising.
Other advantages will become apparent from the following detailed description when taken in conjunction with the drawings, in which:
The invention may be described in the general context of computer-executable instructions, such as program modules, being executed by a computer. Generally, program modules include routines, programs, objects, components, data structures, and so forth, which perform particular tasks or implement particular abstract data types. The invention may also be practiced in distributed computing environments where tasks are performed by remote processing devices that are linked through a communications network. In a distributed computing environment, program modules may be located in local and/or remote computer storage media including memory storage devices.
With reference to
The computer system 100 may include a variety of computer-readable media. Computer-readable media can be any available media that can be accessed by the computer system 100 and includes both volatile and nonvolatile media. For example, computer-readable media may include volatile and nonvolatile computer storage media implemented in any method or technology for storage of information such as computer-readable instructions, data structures, program modules or other data. Computer storage media includes, but is not limited to, RAM, ROM, EEPROM, flash memory or other memory technology, CD-ROM, digital versatile disks (DVD) or other optical disk storage, magnetic cassettes, magnetic tape, magnetic disk storage or other magnetic storage devices, or any other medium which can be used to store the desired information and which can accessed by the computer system 100. Communication media may include computer-readable instructions, data structures, program modules or other data in a modulated data signal such as a carrier wave or other transport mechanism and includes any information delivery media. The term “modulated data signal” means a signal that has one or more of its characteristics set or changed in such a manner as to encode information in the signal. For instance, communication media includes wired media such as a wired network or direct-wired connection, and wireless media such as acoustic, RF, infrared and other wireless media.
The system memory 104 includes computer storage media in the form of volatile and/or nonvolatile memory such as read only memory (ROM) 106 and random access memory (RAM) 110. A basic input/output system 108 (BIOS), containing the basic routines that help to transfer information between elements within computer system 100, such as during start-up, is typically stored in ROM 106. Additionally, RAM 110 may contain operating system 112, application programs 114, other executable code 116 and program data 118. RAM 110 typically contains data and/or program modules that are immediately accessible to and/or presently being operated on by CPU 102.
The computer system 100 may also include other removable/non-removable, volatile/nonvolatile computer storage media. By way of example only,
The drives and their associated computer storage media, discussed above and illustrated in
The computer system 100 may operate in a networked environment using a network 136 to one or more remote computers, such as a remote computer 146. The remote computer 146 may be a personal computer, a server, a router, a network PC, a peer device or other common network node, and typically includes many or all of the elements described above relative to the computer system 100. The network 136 depicted in
The present invention is generally directed towards a system and method for using contextual sections of content for serving advertisements in online advertising. Content, as used herein, may mean any content type including, but not limited to, text, static graphics, video, audio, and rich media such as Macromedia Flash. In general, the content may be described by a markup language including, but not limited to, web pages, RSS feeds, audio playlists, video streams, content designed for mobile phones, and electronic games. In an embodiment, content sections of a web page may be marked for use in serving contextual advertisements. Content from marked sections may then be extracted from a web page when rendered by a client device such as a web browser, and the content may then be sent to an advertisement system for selecting advertisements that match the extracted content. Web page placements may be allocated for advertisements matching the extracted content, and the advertisements may be served for display with the web page. As used herein, a web page placement may mean a location on a web page designated for placing an advertisement for display.
As will be seen, applications that may display advertisements to users who visit a web site, including managed content properties, may use the present invention to serve advertisements that may be matched with relevant content sections of a web page to more accurately reflect the context of the content requested by a user. As will be understood, the various block diagrams, flow charts and scenarios described herein are only examples, and there are many other scenarios to which the present invention will apply.
Turning to
In various embodiments, a client computer 202 may be operably coupled to one or more servers 210 by a network 208. The client computer 202 may be a computer such as computer system 100 of
The server 210 may be any type of computer system or computing device such as computer system 100 of
The server 210 may be operably coupled to computer-readable storage media such as storage 218 that may store any type of advertisements 220 and web pages 222 that may have content sections 224. In an embodiment, an advertisement 220 may be displayed according to a web page placement 228. An advertisement ID 226 associated with an advertisement 220 may be allocated to a web page placement 228 that may include a Uniform Resource Locator (URL) 230 for a web page and a position 232 for displaying an advertisement on the web page. In various embodiments, a web page may be any information that may be addressable by a URL, including a document, an image, audio, and so forth.
There may be many applications which may serve advertisements using contextual sections of content in online advertising. For example, online content publishing applications may use the present invention to select a list of advertisements that match the contextual sections of web page content for display with content requested by a user. Similarly, ecommerce applications may use the present invention to select a list of advertisements that match the contextual sections of product information on a web page requested by a user. Or online search advertising applications may use the present invention to select a list of advertisements that match the contextual sections of a web page in search results requested by a user. For any of these online applications, the contextual sections of content may be used for serving advertisements in online advertising.
In general, selecting contextual sections of content, of a web page for example, may allow more accurate targeting in contextual advertisement by using content sections that are most descriptive of the unique content of the web page and by eliminating other content sections of the web page that are not relevant for matching advertisements. In particular, features such as keywords in sections of a web page such as the main link bar, headers, footers, and templates may dominate content of a web page and otherwise be used along with unique content for selecting an advertisement. Advantageously, just the content of specific sections of a web page may be selected that are most descriptive of the unique content of the web page for use in contextual advertisement targeting.
In an embodiment, a tool may be provided that may take a URL and allow sections of the web page to be marked. A publisher may use the tool to identify sections of the web page that represent content to be used in contextual advertising. For example, there may be a section for a product specification and a section that describes that product itself. The publisher may accordingly identify the sections of the web page that represent the unique content of the web page. The marked sections of content may then be parsed to identify features, and the features may be matched to advertisements to select one or more advertisements. Thus, advertisements may be targeted to relevant content sections of the web page, and other sections of the web page that are not relevant for matching an advertisement are effectively removed from consideration when targeting advertisements to a web page.
The toolbar 304 may also include a show ads button 310 that may be clicked to display advertisements targeted to the content sections marked, such as the advertisements illustrated in the display area of
At step 408, the features from the marked content sections may be used to select advertisements that match the extracted content. For example, each advertiser may designate features such as keywords that may be used for matching their advertisement to content of a web page, and these features may be matched with features extracted from the marked content sections of a web page to select advertisements. Advertisements matching the extracted content may then be sent at step 410 for display with the web page. And the advertisements may be displayed with the web page at step 412.
At step 508, marked content may be extracted from the web page. In an embodiment, the content may be extracted by the client and sent to an advertising server. In various other embodiments, the markers indicating the content may be sent to the advertising server and the advertising server may extract the content from the web page for the marked sections. Advertisements matching the content for the marked sections of the web page may be received at step 512 by the client and displayed at step 514 with the web page by a web browser, for instance.
At step 606, features may be identified from the content sections for selecting matching advertisements, and the features may be used at step 608 to select advertisements matching the extracted content of the web page. For an online publishing advertising application, features designated by each advertiser may be used for matching their advertisement to content of a web page by matching the features designated by an advertiser with features extracted from the marked content sections of a web page. Or for an email application, features extracted from content sections of the email may be matched with features extracted from the marked content sections of a web page to select advertisements.
At step 610, web page placements may be allocated for the advertisements that match the content sections of the web page and the advertisement may be served for display in the allocated web page placements. For an online publishing advertising application, web page placements may be allocated for displaying advertisements along with the content requested. Or for an email advertising application, web page placements may be allocated in designated display areas of the email messages page displayed to a user.
Thus the present invention may be used by applications that may display advertisements to users who visit a website, including managed content properties, to serve advertisements that may be matched with relevant content sections of a web page to more accurately reflect the context of the content requested by a user. Advantageously, the system and method may reduce the content parsed to identify features used for selecting advertisements. It may also be used to eliminate features that may be in other sections of the content that are not relevant for matching an advertisement. In various embodiments, content sections may be marked to indicate that the content sections should not be sent or analyzed because the sections may include privacy information, financial information, or other personally identifiable information that should not be sent or analyzed for contextual advertising. As a result, more accurate targeting may be achieved in contextual advertisement by using content sections that are most descriptive of the unique content and by eliminating other content sections that are not relevant for matching advertisements. Thus, the present invention may improve the quality of contextual advertisement placements in online advertising applications.
In addition to a publisher marking content sections of any content described by a markup language, it will be appreciated that content sections may also be marked in various embodiments by a user, an automated software agent, or website operators who may manage an inventory of advertisements that may be shown to visitors viewing content of a website. Any type of computing device may use the present invention to transmit marked content sections for selectively matching advertisements for display to a user. When content may be rendered by a client device, content from marked sections may be extracted and sent to an advertisement server for selectively matching advertisements for display to a user. The present invention may mark content of any type including, but not limited to, text, static graphics, video, audio, and rich media such as Macromedia Flash. Furthermore, various mechanisms may be used for transmitting content of marked sections to an advertising system, including user agent extraction, data feeds and crawling of content to identify marked sections. Moreover, just the marked content sections may be transmitted to an advertising system or any subset of content may be transmitted, including marked content sections.
As can be seen from the foregoing detailed description, the present invention provides an improved system and method for using contextual sections for serving advertisements in online advertising. A publisher may use a tool to identify the sections of the content that represent the unique content to be used in contextual advertising. The marked content sections of a web page, for example, may be used to identify advertisements that match the context of the content of the web page. In an application, the marked sections of content may be parsed to identify features, and the features may be matched with features associated with advertisements to select one or more advertisements. Online content publishing applications may use the present invention to select a list of advertisements that match the contextual sections of web page content for display with content requested by a user. Similarly, ecommerce applications may use the present invention to select a list of advertisements that match the contextual sections of product information on a web page requested by a user. Or online search advertising applications may use the present invention to select a list of advertisements that match the contextual sections of a web page in search results requested by a user. Accordingly, the system and method provide significant advantages and benefits needed in contemporary computing and in online applications.
While the invention is susceptible to various modifications and alternative constructions, certain illustrated embodiments thereof are shown in the drawings and have been described above in detail. It should be understood, however, that there is no intention to limit the invention to the specific forms disclosed, but on the contrary, the intention is to cover all modifications, alternative constructions, and equivalents falling within the spirit and scope of the invention.