Ad placement is defined literally as “where are you placing the ad on the page”. It could be at the top of the page, where it is immediately seen by the site visitor (industry vernacular: “Above the fold”), or somewhere else on the page where it is only partially visible or out of view completely (industry vernacular: “Below the fold”).
“Click rate” measurements are used as the current industry standard of performance measurement for ads on websites. However, this method fails to provide a full understanding of ad placement, user engagement/interaction on a website, and how user engagement measurements can drive future creative development.
The present invention provides systems and methods for capturing user engagements with Ad content included in a webpage. An example method renders a webpage having an Ad unit within a browser on a display of a user's computer. Then, a cursor event for an Ad unit included in the rendered webpage is recorded based on cursor position relative to an area on the webpage associated with the Ad unit and the recorded cursor event is transmitted to a server via a network for reporting to interested parties.
In one aspect of the invention, the cursor event includes an initial cursor entry event that is based on a first entry of the cursor into the Ad area since the webpage was rendered. The cursor event may also include amount of time the cursor was located in the Ad area, any click actions associated with the cursor while the cursor was located in the Ad area and any hover actions based on lack of movement of the cursor within in the Ad area for a predefined threshold of time.
In another aspect of the invention, the recordation of a cursor event is further based on location information associated with the browser within the display, the webpage within the browser and the ad area within the webpage.
Preferred and alternative examples of the present invention are described in detail below with reference to the following drawings:
“User Engagement” is defined as a non-transient mouse cursor entry (see cursor 44) within an ad area 50. Non-transient is defined as a constant presence of the mouse cursor 44 within the ad area 50 for a pre-defined period of time, measured in milliseconds (e.g., 500 ms or between 100 ms and 1 sec). Additional mouse event types include a hover event (see cursor 46), a click event (see cursor 42), and a mouse exit event (see cursor 48).
There are multiple forms of user engagement captured by present invention (see
As shown in
Although the canvas model 80 is capable of seeing and capturing mouse events, there is no interruption or interference with the ad creative, such that the third-party ad creative developer is not restricted in any way in terms of developing a fully-interactive ad creative. In the canvas model, all user mouse interaction with the ad creative is captured by the canvas and reported to one or more of the server(s) 16, 18, 19.
At a block 134, all recorded events and time (i.e., raw data) are reported back to the ad server(s) 16-19 for every ad impression delivered to a publisher site page and stored in event logs. The server(s) 16-19 performs a Map/Reduce process to convert the received raw data into a reporting database format. The data, once processed, reports a set (e.g. traditional Impressions, Clicks, Click-through Rate (CTR), and Total Unique Visitors (Uniques)) of statistics in the form of:
The term mouse refers to any device that controls operation of a displayed cursor.
For every event, the following elements are reported to one of the server(s) 16-19 as parameter values:
Publisher and pageurl parameters are intended to be populated through the use of third-party ad network “macros”, which substitute a pre-defined keyword string with an applicable runtime value. For example, the RMX macros for publisher and pageurl are $ {PUBLISHERID} and $ {SOURCEURLENC}, respectively.
The following elements are only included with the AdImpression event as extended elements, as defined in the last column of
The following is a sample of Standard Flash Object Code, as it would typically exist without the invention, with example Ad Server Macro elements (as indicated by content with the brackets [ ]) referenced:
In contrast, the invention's equivalent code appears as below, with the same example Ad Server Macro elements referenced:
The above invention's version of the code adopts the same usage of the traditional ad server macro references, but uses them specifically with the invention's code to pass these ad server values as attributes into the invention's Javascript and Flash code. The entirety of the invention's code replaces the traditional Ad Container code.
While the preferred embodiment of the invention has been illustrated and described, as noted above, many changes can be made without departing from the spirit and scope of the invention. Accordingly, the scope of the invention is not limited by the disclosure of the preferred embodiment. Instead, the invention should be determined entirely by reference to the claims that follow.
This application claims the benefit of U.S. Provisional Application Ser. Nos. 61/267,742, 61/267,748, 61/267,751 filed Dec. 8, 2009, which are hereby incorporated by reference.
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