Identifying website activities as being those of a telephone caller

• US 9,641,674 B1
• Filed: 01/19/2016
• Issued: 05/02/2017
• Est. Priority Date: 01/16/2015
• Status: Active Grant

• Current Assignee: Adpearance, Inc.
• Original Assignee: Adpearance, Inc.
• Inventors: Steinberg, David, Schoen, Bryan N., O'Connell, Dennis P., Hornbrook, Stephen F., Shauger, Geoffrey
• Primary Examiner(s): TRAN, QUOC DUC
• Application Number:
  US15/001,169
• Time in Patent Office: 469 Days
• Field of Search: 37926501, 37926511, 37926601, 37926607
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 16/955 using information identifiers, e.g. uniform resource locators [URL]
• CPC Class Codes: H04M 2203/558 Databases
• CPC Class Codes: H04M 3/5175 Call or contact centers supervision arrangements
• CPC Class Codes: H04M 3/54 Arrangements for diverting calls for one subscriber to another predetermined subscriber based on the calling party profile H04M3/42059; based on location H04M3/42348; based on presence H04M3/42365; to voice mail H04M3/53308

Abstract

Disclosed are systems and methods of identifying website activities of a webpage visitor as being those of a caller placing a telephone call to a published tracking telephone number presented as a substitute for a contact telephone number. The published tracking telephone number is presented as the substitute so that when a webpage visitor observes the published tracking telephone number and acts as the caller, the telephone call is non-disruptively forwarded to the contact telephone number for purpose of identifying the website activities as being those of the caller.

Claims

1. In a website including a contact telephone number configured to be presented as formatted content of a webpage of the website, a method of identifying website activities of a webpage visitor as being those of a caller placing a telephone call to a published tracking telephone number presented as a substitute for the contact telephone number, the published tracking telephone number being presented as the substitute so that when the webpage visitor observes the published tracking telephone number and acts as the caller, the telephone call is non-disruptively forwarded to the contact telephone number for purpose of identifying the website activities as being those of the caller, the method comprising:

obtaining a set of telephone numbers from a provider of telephony infrastructure, the telephony infrastructure configured to facilitate connectivity between networked devices and a public switched telephone network (PSTN);

allocating from the set of telephone numbers a pool of tracking telephone numbers available as substitutes for the contact telephone number, the pool of tracking telephone numbers sized to include a quantity of numbers that is based on traffic volume of the webpage;

providing, for transmission from a website server of the webpage to a client browser visiting the webpage, a first set of machine-readable instructions that, when performed by the client browser, configure the client browser to communicate with a tracking system and obtain from it further instructions to swap, in response to the webpage visitor visiting the webpage, the contact telephone number with the published tracking telephone number selected by the tracking system from the pool of tracking telephone numbers such that the published tracking telephone number appears in the webpage as the formatted content;

storing in a database of the tracking system information indicating that the published tracking telephone number has been presented to the webpage visitor as the substitute for the contact telephone number;

tracking the website activities defined by actions of the webpage visitor taken on the website, the website activities including webpages visited and referral source;

providing, for configuring a call-processing application server of the provider of the telephony infrastructure, a second set of machine-readable instructions that, when performed by the call-processing application server, configure the call-processing application server to send a network request to the tracking system in response to receiving the telephone call placed to the published tracking telephone number, the network request including information identifying the published tracking telephone number and caller details, the caller details including a caller telephone number originating the telephone call, a name associated with the caller telephone number, and a geographic location associated with the caller telephone number;

in response to receiving the network request, searching the database for the published tracking telephone number to retrieve the contact telephone number associated with it and to associate the caller details with the webpage visitor and website activities thereof; and

providing to the call-processing application server the contact telephone number retrieved from the database to thereby cause the call-processing application server to forward the telephone call to the contact telephone number.

2. The method of claim 1, further comprising searching the database to determine whether the caller telephone number had been associated with a previous website visitor that had used the caller telephone number to make a previous telephone call to the published tracking telephone number.

3. The method of claim 2, further comprising identifying the caller as the previous website visitor.

4. The method of claim 2, further comprising providing to the call-processing application server the contact telephone number that had been used for the previous website visitor.

5. The method of claim 1, further comprising storing in the database the caller details and a reference to the webpage visitor.

6. The method of claim 1, further comprising selecting the published tracking telephone number from the pool of tracking telephone numbers by identifying a previously published tracking telephone number having an oldest publication time.

7. The method of claim 1, further comprising providing the contact telephone number by communicating to the call-processing application server a third set of machine-readable instructions listing the contact telephone number.

8. The method of claim 1, further comprising reporting the website activities to a recipient of the telephone call.

9. The method of claim 1, further comprising determining the traffic volume based on a number of visits that the webpage receives in a defined period.

10. The method of claim 1, in which the webpage visitor comprises a first webpage visitor, the method further comprising, in response to detecting a period of inactivity of the first webpage visitor on the webpage, reusing the published tracking telephone number for a second webpage visitor that is different than the first webpage visitor.

11. The method of claim 1, further comprising:

determining whether a webpage visitor is an Internet bot web crawler; and

suppressing publication of a tracking telephone number in response to determining that the webpage visitor is an Internet bot web crawler.