DETERMINING CONVERSION RATES FOR ON-LINE PURCHASES

• US 20130085841A1
• Filed: 06/08/2011
• Published: 04/04/2013
• Est. Priority Date: 06/08/2010
• Status: Active Grant

• Current Assignee: Google LLC (Alphabet Inc.)
• Original Assignee: Google Inc. (Alphabet Inc.)
• Inventors: Singleton, David P., Barr, Miles E.
• Granted Patent: US 9,324,095 B2
• Time in Patent Office: Days
• US Class Current: 705/14.45
• CPC Class Codes: G06Q 30/02 Marketing; Price estimation or determination; Fundraising
• CPC Class Codes: G06Q 30/0246 Traffic
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 63/0876 based on the identity of the terminal or configuration, e.g. MAC address, hardware or software configuration or device fingerprint

Abstract

Identifying on-line advertising conversions includes identifying, at a computer server system, a plurality of reports from one or more computing devices, wherein each of the reports indicates a clock skew between one of the computing devices and a clock server system; using the clock skews to determine that two or more of the reports are likely from a common computing device; determining that the two or more of the reports are common, in that they correspond to display of an advertisement on the common computing device and to purchase of on-line content with the common computing device; and indicating that a purchase conversion occurred based on determining that the two or more of the reports are common.

Claims

1. A computer-implemented method for identifying on-line advertising conversion, the method comprising:

identifying, at a computer server system, a plurality of reports received from one or more computing devices, wherein each of the reports indicates a clock skew between one of the computing devices and a clock server system;

using the clock skews to determine that two or more of the reports are likely from a common computing device;

determining that the two or more of the reports correspond to display of an advertisement on the common computing device and to purchase of on-line content that is promoted by the advertisement with the common computing device; and

indicating that a purchase conversion occurred based on determining that the two or more of the reports are common.

2. The method of claim 1, further comprising serving code for a web advertisement to a computing device that causes a clock skew for the computing device to be determined as a result of a user of the computing device interacting with the web advertisement.

3. The method of claim 2, further comprising receiving a skew reporting instance from the computing device and storing information identifying the advertisement and clock skew for the computing device in a reporting log.

4. The method of claim 1, wherein the clock skews are determined by sending a time request from a requesting computing device to a target computing device, and using a time received form the target computer to determine a clock skew.

5. The method of claim 4, wherein the clock skews are determined by subtracting the time received from the target computing device from a current time on the requesting computing device, and using one-half of a round-trip time period for the time request.

6. The method of claim 4, wherein the requesting computing device is a client computing device and the target computing device is a part of the computer server system.

7. The method of claim 4, wherein using the clock skews to determine that two or more of the reports are likely from a common computing device comprises determining that a clock skew for a first reporting instance is within a predefined range of a clock skew for a second reporting instance.

8. The method of claim 7, wherein using the clock skews to determine that two or more of the reports are likely from a common computing device comprises ordering the plurality of reports according to level of clock skew.

9. The method of claim 7, wherein determining that the two or more of the reports are common comprises identifying matches between displayed advertisements and converted purchase transactions from a group of reports that each have clock skews that differ by a threshold amount of time or less.

10. The method of claim 9, wherein the two or more of the reports are being determined to be from a common computing device when they occur within a threshold amount of time defined by the time-limited window.

11. The method of claim 1, wherein determining that the two or more reports correspond to the common computing devices further includes determining whether additional information included in the two or more reports match within a threshold variance.

12. The method of claim 11, wherein the additional information comprises one or more environmental indicators that indicate a physical environment within which a computing device was located when a reporting instance was provided.

13. The method of claim 12, wherein the environmental indicators include one or more of:

sound, temperature, and location information that indicates a geographic location.

14. The method of claim 11, wherein the additional information comprises one or more pieces of information selected from the group consisting of an IP address, information identifying a model of a computing device, information identifying an operating system, and a version of an operating system of a computing device.

15. A computer-implemented system for identifying on-line advertising conversion, the system comprising:

an advertising sub-system arranged to serve interactive advertisements to users of computing devices;

one or more transaction logs that store transaction instance data representing interactions by computer users with the advertisements and with products that are subjects of the advertisements; and

a conversion correlator programmed to correlate connections between interactions with advertisements with interactions with products that are subjects of the advertisements by matching clock skew data for the computing devices.

16. The system of claim 15, wherein the interactive advertisements are served with code that cause interaction with the advertisements to result in a clock skew being computed for a device on which an advertisement has been displayed, and being reported to the one or more transaction logs.

17. The system of claim 15, further comprising an application marketplace offering one or more applications for sale that, when installed on a computing device, cause a clock skew for a device on which the application is installed to be reported to the one or more transaction logs.

18. The system of claim 15, further comprising a transaction log manager programmed to remove entries from the logs after the conversion correlator has analyzed the entries.

19. A computer-implemented method comprising:

receiving, at a computing device, input that indicates that a user has selected an advertisement being displayed by the computing device;

in response to receiving the input, determining a first clock skew for the computing device relative to a computer server system at a first time and providing the first clock skew; and

executing, by the computing device, code associated with content that is related to the advertisement and that was purchased by a user of the computing device, wherein execution of the code causes the computing device to determine a second clock skew for the computing device relative to the computer server system at a second time and to provide the second clock skew;

wherein the first clock skew and the second clock skew are used to verify that selection of the advertisement and purchase of the content was performed by the computing device.

20. The computer-implemented method of claim 19, wherein first additional information associated with the computing device at the first time is provided with the first clock skew and second additional information associated with the computing device at the second time is provided with the second clock skew;

wherein the first additional information and the second additional information are additionally used to verify that that selection of the advertisement and purchase of the content was performed by the computing device.