Techniques for facilitating on-line contextual analysis and advertising
Various techniques are disclosed for facilitating on-line contextual analysis and/or advertising operations implemented in a computer network. According to some embodiments, various aspects may be used for enabling advertisers to provide contextual advertising promotions to end-users based upon real-time analysis of web page content which may be served to an end-user's computer system. In at least one embodiment, the information obtained from the real-time analysis may be used to select, in real-time, contextually relevant information, advertisements, and/or other content which may then be displayed to the end-user, for example, via real-time insertion of textual markup objects and/or dynamic content. According to specific embodiments, various operations may be performed for adapting or modifying a conventional context-based advertising systems to improve various features such as, for example, ad relevance estimation, click-through rate estimation, advertisement selection and layout, balancing exploration and exploitation, etc.
1 . A system for facilitating on-line contextual advertising operations implemented in a computer network, the system comprising:
an estimation engine adapted to generate EMV information relating to estimates of Expected Monitory Values (EMV) based on specified criteria, said specified criteria including click through rate (CTR) estimation information;
a relevance engine adapted to generate relevance information relating to relevance criteria between a specified page or document and at least one specified ad;
a layout engine adapted to generate ad ranking information for one or more of the at least one specified ads using the relevance information and EMV information;
a data analysis engine adapted to analyze historical information including user behavior information and advertising-related information; and
an exploration engine adapted to explore the use of selected keywords and ads in order for the purpose of improving EMV estimation.
2 . The system of claim 1 wherein at least one EMV estimate is computed using a first click through rate CTR estimate and a first cost per click (CPC) parameter relating to a selected ad.
3 . The system of claim 1 wherein the click through rate (CTR) estimation refers to the statistical estimation of a probability that a user will click on a certain highlighted keyword associated with a specified ad in a certain context.
4 . The system of claim 1 wherein the estimation engine is further adapted to estimate the probability P(c=1|a, h, p) that a given an ad a served at a highlight h of a keyword k on a page p will be clicked (c=1) by a user during a next page display.
5 . The system of claim 1 wherein the estimation engine is further adapted to estimate the probability P(c=1|a, h, p) that a given an ad a served at a highlight h of a keyword k on a page p will be clicked (c=1) by a user during a next page display, according to the formula:
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6 . The system of claim 1 wherein the estimation engine is further adapted to generate back-off estimate(s) computed based on a mixture of different empirical estimates, each made from the counts of a particular abstracted comparison classes.
7 . The system of claim 1 wherein the estimation engine is further adapted to generate one or more back-off estimates, wherein at least one of the back-off estimates is selected from a group consisting of:
{circumflex over (P)}(c=1|t(p),h,a), which represents the probability of a click occurring given the specific topical class of the specific web page, specific highlight, and specific ad;
{circumflex over (P)}(c=1|s(p),h,a), which represents the probability of a click occurring given the specific website, specific highlight, and specific ad;
{circumflex over (P)}(c=1|p,k(h)), which represents the probability of a click occurring given the specific web page, and specific keyword;
{circumflex over (P)}(c=1|p,a), which represents the probability of a click occurring given the specific web page, and specific ad;
{circumflex over (P)}(c=1|k,a), which represents the probability of a click occurring given the specific keyword, and specific ad;
{circumflex over (P)}(c=1|a), which represents the probability of a click occurring given the specific ad;
{circumflex over (P)}(c=1|k(h)), which represents the probability of a click occurring given the specific keyword;
{circumflex over (P)}(c=1|t(p)=t(a)), which represents the probability of a click occurring given that the topical class of the specific web page matches the topical class of the specific ad; and
{circumflex over (P)}(c=1), which represents the probability of a click occurring for all topical classes, web pages, highlights, keywords.
8 . The system of claim 1 wherein the at least a portion of the Expected Monitory Values (EMV) estimates are based on mouseover information relating to whether or not a user put his mouse over a particular highlight on a selected page.
9 . The system of claim 1 wherein the estimation engine is further adapted to perform logistic regression computations in computing the Expected Monitory Values (EMV) estimates.
10 . The system of claim 1 :
wherein the estimation engine is further adapted to generate back-off estimates based on one or more click through rate (CTR) estimates, wherein each CTR estimate is calculated based on a specific set of criteria; and
wherein the estimation engine is further adapted to perform logistic regression computations according to:
P ( c= 1 |p,h,a )≈ LR f(i) [EM i +λ i Features i ],
wherein LR f(i) represents a logistic regression function, EM i represents one or more back-off estimates, Features i represents one or more general features, and λ i represents a respective weighted value for each Features i parameter; and
wherein said general features may include at least one criteria selected from a group consisting of: whether the keyword is capitalized; whether the ad text ends in an exclamation point; whether the keyword occurs in the page title; length of ad length of keyword; length of page; position on page; structure of page; other ads on page; type of ad; html elements; and whether keyword is bold; font of ad.
11 . The system of claim 1 wherein the relevance engine is further adapted to generate page classifier data for use in determining relevancy of keywords on a selected page;
wherein the page classifier data is generated using at least one mechanism selected from a group consisting of: a term frequency-inverse document frequency (TF-IDF) mechanism, a cosine similarity mechanism; a Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence mechanism; a text classification mechanism; a support vector machine (SVM) mechanism; a logistic regression mechanism; and a taxonomy based classification mechanism.
12 . The system of claim 1 wherein the relevance engine is further adapted to generate ad classifier data for use in determining relevancy of ads with respect to content associated with a selected page;
wherein the ad classifier data is generated using at least one mechanism selected from a group consisting of: a term frequency-inverse document frequency (TF-IDF) mechanism, a cosine similarity mechanism; a KL divergence mechanism; a text classification mechanism; a support vector machine (SVM) mechanism; a logistic regression mechanism; and a taxonomy based classification mechanism.
13 . The system of claim 1 wherein the relevance engine is further adapted to generate the ad ranking information based upon:
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where p represents a selected page, h represents a selected keyword, k(h) represents the keyword type of keyword h, f(p, h, a) represents the score given to a particular page/highlight/ad combination, d(hi, h i +1) represents the distance between adjacent highlights hi and h i +1, and g represents a function mapping integer distances to real numbers.
14 . The system of claim 1 wherein the relevance engine is further adapted to generate the ad ranking information based upon the relevance information and the EMV information.
15 . The system of claim 1 wherein the layout engine is further adapted to generate weight estimation and relevance features.
16 . The system of claim 1 wherein the layout engine is further adapted to select one or more keyword highlight layouts on a selected page using at least one criteria selected from a group consisting of: a click through rate CTR estimation, a relevancy score, and an ad layout consideration.
17 . A method for facilitating on-line contextual advertising operations implemented in a computer network, the method comprising:
identifying a first page for contextual ad analysis;
generating page classifier data using content associated with the first page;
identifying a first group of keywords on the page as being candidates for ad markup/highlighting;
identifying one or more potential ads for selected keywords of the first group of keywords;
generating ad classifier data for each of the identified ads using at least one criteria selected from a group consisting of: ad content, meta data, and content of the ad's landing URL.
generating a relevance score for each of the selected ads, wherein the relevance score indicates the degree of relevance between a given ad and the content of the identified page;
generating a ranking value for each selected ad based on the ad's associated relevance score and associated EVM estimate; and.
selecting specific keywords for markup/highlighting using at least the ad ranking values.
18 . The method of claim 17 wherein at least one EMV estimate is computed using a first click through rate CTR estimate and a first cost per click (CPC) parameter relating to a selected ad.
19 . The method of claim 18 wherein the click through rate (CTR) estimation refers to the statistical estimation of a probability that a user will click on a certain highlighted keyword associated with a specified ad in a certain context.
20 . The method of claim 17 further comprising:
estimating the probability P(c=1|a, h, p) that a given an ad a served at a highlight h of a keyword k on a page p will be clicked (c=1) by a user during a next page display.
21 . The method of claim 17 further comprising:
generating one or more back-off estimates, wherein at least one of the back-off estimates is selected from a group consisting of:
{circumflex over (P)}(c=1|t(p),h,a), which represents the probability of a click occurring given the specific topical class of the specific web page, specific highlight, and specific ad;
{circumflex over (P)}(c=1|s(p),h,a), which represents the probability of a click occurring given the specific website, specific highlight, and specific ad;
{circumflex over (P)}(c=1|p,k(h)), which represents the probability of a click occurring given the specific web page, and specific keyword;
{circumflex over (P)}(c=1|p,a), which represents the probability of a click occurring given the specific web page, and specific ad;
{circumflex over (P)}(c=1|k,a), which represents the probability of a click occurring given the specific keyword, and specific ad;
{circumflex over (P)}(c=1|a), which represents the probability of a click occurring given the specific ad;
{circumflex over (P)}(c=1|k(h)), which represents the probability of a click occurring given the specific keyword;
{circumflex over (P)}(c=1|t(p)=t(a)), which represents the probability of a click occurring given that the topical class of the specific web page matches the topical class of the specific ad; and
{circumflex over (P)}(c=1), which represents the probability of a click occurring for all topical classes, web pages, highlights, keywords.
22 . The method of claim 17 wherein the at least a portion of the Expected Monitory Values (EMV) estimates are based on mouseover information relating to whether or not a user put his mouse over a particular highlight on a selected page.
23 . The method of claim 17 further comprising:
performing logistic regression computations in computing the Expected Monitory Values (EMV) estimates.
24 . The method of claim 17 wherein the page classifier data is generated using at least one mechanism selected from a group consisting of: a term frequency-inverse document frequency (TF-IDF) mechanism, a cosine similarity mechanism; a KL divergence mechanism; a text classification mechanism; a support vector machine (SVM) mechanism; a logistic regression mechanism; and a taxonomy based classification mechanism.
25 . The method of claim 17 wherein the ad classifier data is generated using at least one mechanism selected from a group consisting of: a term frequency-inverse document frequency (TF-IDF) mechanism, a cosine similarity mechanism; a KL divergence mechanism; a text classification mechanism; a support vector machine (SVM) mechanism; a logistic regression mechanism; and a taxonomy based classification mechanism.
26 . The method of claim 17 further comprising:
generating the ad ranking value based upon ad relevance information and the EMV estimates relating to the ad.
27 . The method of claim 17 further comprising:
selecting one or more keyword highlight layouts on a selected page using at least one criteria selected from a group consisting of: a click through rate CTR estimation, a relevancy score, and an ad layout consideration.