Aggregating and analyzing information about content requested in an e-commerce web environment to determine conversion rates

• US 6,892,238 B2
• Filed: 03/13/2002
• Issued: 05/10/2005
• Est. Priority Date: 01/27/1999
• Status: Expired due to Term

• Current Assignee: Adobe Inc.
• Original Assignee: International Business Machines Corporation
• Inventors: Wood, David A., Lee, Juhnyoung, Schonberg, Edith Gail, Podlaseck, Mark Edward, Morgenstern, Leora
• Primary Examiner(s): Najjar, Saleh
• Application Number:
  US10/098,854
• Publication Number:
  US 20020161673A1
• Time in Patent Office: 1,154 Days
• Field of Search: 709/224, 709/225, 709/226, 709/229, 709/217, 705/10, 705/26, 705/27, 705/14
• US Class Current: 709/224
• CPC Class Codes: G06Q 30/02 Marketing; Price estimation or determination; Fundraising

Abstract

A computer system and method computes conversion rates for individual products and/or product categories in an e-commerce Web site for measuring the effectiveness of the marketing in the Web site, and to associate the conversion rates with metadata information about products and/or product categories on served Web pages. An aggregation process traverses the log to determine the number of one or more of the shopping activities by requesters in the Web site, to compare two or more of the activity numbers in a conversion rate, and to relate the conversion rate to one or more of the metadata fields. The conversion rates give a measure of the effectiveness of the Web site and/or portions of the Web site for sales, marketing and merchandising.

Claims

1. A computer system having one or more central processing units, one or more memories, and one or more network interfaces connected to one or more networks, the system further comprising:

a server process, executed by one or more of the central processing units, the server process receiving one or more requests for one or more Web pages from one or more requesters through one or more of the network interfaces, producing the requested Web pages from one or more of the memories, and further serving each of the Web pages with one or more content elements to the requester, the content elements being segments of the document including associated markup tags on the respective served Web page;

a logger process, executed by one or more of the central processing units, the logger process collecting one or more metadata entries contained in each of one or more metadata fields in the requested Web pages in one or more records;

a log having the one or more records, each record having one or more requester fields and one or more metadata fields, the requester fields having information about a requester of the Web page and the metadata fields having information about one or more content elements associated with the respective Web page and about one or more objects associated with the one or more content elements; and

an aggregation process, executed by one or more of the central processing units, the aggregation process traversing the log and determining, by using the metadata fields, a count for each of a plurality of events, each count indicating a number of times an event has occurred, each event corresponding to a given object from the information in the metadata fields, the aggregation process further determining one or more conversion rates for at least one of the given objects, each conversion rate corresponding to one given object and multiple events corresponding to the one given object, wherein each conversion rate describes a likelihood of one event of the multiple events translating into a second event of the multiple events.

2. A system, as in claim 1, where one or more of the content elements are segments of the document including associated markup tags on the respective served Web page.

3. A system, as in claim 2, where the markup tags include any one or more of the following:

HyperText Markup Language (HTML) tag, an eXtensible Markup Language (XML) tag, a Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML) tag, an head tag, a title tag, a body tag, a heading tag, a paragraph tag, an anchor tag, a link tag, a font tag, a form tag, a table tag, a meta tag, and an address tag.

4. A system, as in claim 1, where the one or more of the requester fields contain any one or more of the following pieces of information:

a cookie, an Internet Protocol (IP) address, a session identifier, a string which uniquely identifies the particular session between a client and server, and a requester classification.

5. A system, as in claim 1, where the one or more of the metadata fields further contain a Web page description field, where the Web page description field is any one or more of the following pieces of information:

a Web page Uniform Resource Locator (URL), an URL of a referral Web page, and a description of the respective Web page.

6. A system, as in claim 5, where the description of the respective Web page referenced by the hyperlink includes one or more the following:

a product category name, and a product name.

7. A system, as in claim 1, where the one or more of the metadata fields contain one or more hyperlink fields, where each of the hyperlink fields comprise any one or more of the following pieces of information:

an URL referenced by a hyperlink on the respective Web page being served, a description of the respective Web page referenced by the hyperlink, an application-specific description, and a description of a hyperlink appearance when it is rendered by a browser.

8. A system, as in claim 7, where the description of the respective Web page referenced by the hyperlink includes one or more the following:

a product category name, and a product name.

9. A system, as in claim 7, where the application-specific description includes any one or more of the following merchandising classification links:

a cross-sell link, an up-sell link, a promotion, an advertisement, a search, a direct-link, a personalization link, and a recommender link.

10. A system, as in claim 7, where the description of the hyperlink appearance includes one or more of the following:

a media type, a font type, a location on the rendered Web page, and a color.

11. A system, as in claim 7, where the metadata field is specified in any one or more of the following markup language formats and their variations:

HTML (HyperText Markup Language), XML (eXtensible Markup Language), and SGML (Standard Generalized Markup Language).

12. A system, as in claim 1, where the conversion rate includes any one or more of the following:

the number of click-throughs of a hyperlink divided by the number of impressions of the hyperlink, the number of impressions of a Web page divided by the number of impressions of the Web page, the number of the page impression of a product or product category divided by the number of the hyperlink impressions of the product or product category, the number of the shopping-cart-drops of a product or product category divided by the number of the page impressions of the product or product category, the number of the shopping-cart-drops of a product or product category divided by the number of the hyperlink impressions of the product or product category, the number of the purchases of a product or product category divided by the number of the shopping-cart-drops of the product or product category, the number of the purchases of a product or product category divided by the number of the page impressions of the product or product category, and the number of the purchases of a product or product category divided by the number of the hyperlink impressions of the product or product category.

13. A system, as in claim 1, where each object is either a Web page or a hyperlink in a Web site and where the aggregation process assigns names to selected objects by using the metadata fields, where each of the selected objects that is a Web page has a corresponding Web page description field in the metadata fields, and where each of the selected objects that is a hyperlink has a corresponding referenced Web page description field in the metadata fields.

14. A system, as in claim 1, where, for the aggregation process to determine a conversion rate, valid relationships must exist between each of the multiple events and the object to which the multiple events correspond, and each of the multiple events must be related in a predetermined manner.

15. A system, as in claim 1, wherein the logger process removes the metadata fields from the requested Web pages prior to when the server process serves the requested Web pages.

17. A process, as in claim 15, further comprising:

determining factors affecting the marketing effectiveness of one or more of the product and product categories on an e-commerce Web site by relating one or more of the conversion rates of the product and/or product category to the values of one or more of the application-specific and appearance-specific subfields in the metadata entries of one or more of the hyperlinks pointing to one or more Web pages describing the product and/or product category in the Web site.

16. A process, executing on a computer connected to a network, for determining marketing effectiveness of each product and product category on a Web site, comprising the steps of:

collecting information associated with a requester of the Web page, in a requester field of the log record associated with the respective Web page;

collecting one or more metadata entries contained in each of one or more metadata fields on one or more Web pages communicated over the network in a log record, the metadata entries having information about one or more Web pages served, about one or more hyperlinks on the respective Web page, and about one or more objects associated with the one or more Web pages served or the one or more hyperlinks;

determining, by using the metadata fields, a count for each of a plurality of events, each count indicating a number of times an event has occurred, each event corresponding to a given object from the information in the metadata entries; and

determining one or more conversion rates for at least one of the given objects, each conversion rate corresponding to one given object and multiple events corresponding to the one given object, wherein each conversion rate describes a likelihood of one event of the multiple events translating into a second event of the multiple events.

18. A system for determining the marketing effectiveness of each product and product category on a Web site, comprising:

means for collecting information associated with a requester of the Web page, in a requester field of the log record associated with the respective Web page;

means for collecting one or more metadata entries contained in each of one or more metadata fields on one or more Web pages communicated over a network in a log record, the metadata entries having information about one or more Web pages served, about one or more hyperlinks on the respective Web page, and about one or more objects associated with the one or more Web pages served or the one or more hyperlinks;

means for determining, by using the metadata fields, a count for each of a plurality of events, each count indicating a number of times an event has occurred, each event corresponding to a given object from the information in the metadata entries, the means for determining further determining one or more conversion rates for at least one of the given objects, each conversion rate corresponding to one given object and multiple events corresponding to the one object, wherein each conversion rate describes a likelihood of one event of the multiple events translating into a second event of the multiple events.

19. A method of doing business to determine the marketing effectiveness of each product and product category on a Web site, comprising:

collecting information associated with a requester of the Web page, in a requester field of the log record associated with the respective Web page;

collecting one or more metadata entries contained in each of one or more metadata fields on one or more Web pages communicated over a network in a log record, the metadata entries having information about one or more Web pages served, about one or more hyperlinks on the respective Web page, and about one or more objects associated with the one or more Web pages served or the one or more hyperlinks;

determining, by using the metadata fields, a count for each of a plurality of events, each count indicating a number of times an event has occurred, each event corresponding to a given object from the information in the metadata entries;

determining one or more conversion rates for at least one of the given objects, each conversion rate corresponding to one given object and multiple events corresponding to the one given object, wherein each conversion rate describes a likelihood of one event of the multiple events translating into a second event of the multiple events.

20. A computer program product which performs the steps of:

collecting information associated with a requester of a Web page, in a requester field of a log record associated with the respective Web page;

collecting one or more metadata entries contained in each of one or more metadata fields on one or more of the Web pages communicated over a network in a log record, the metadata entries having information about one or more Web pages served, about one or more hyperlinks on the respective Web page, and about one or more objects associated with the one or more Web pages served or the one or more hyperlinks;

determining, by using the metadata fields, a count for each of a plurality of events, each count indicating a number of times an event has occurred, each event corresponding to a given object from the information in the metadata entries; and

determining one or more conversion rates for at least one of the given objects, each conversion rate corresponding to one given object and multiple events corresponding to the one given object, wherein each conversion rate describes a likelihood of one event of the multiple events translating into a second event of the multiple events.