1. Field of the Invention
The present invention concerns advertising. In particular, the present invention concerns improving advertising using end user local time information, such as local time-of-day, local day-of-week, local date, and/or local season information (referred to generally as “time information” in the specification without loss of generality).
2. Related Art
Advertising using traditional media, such as television, radio, newspapers and magazines, is well known. Unfortunately, even when armed with demographic and entirely reasonable assumptions about the typical audience of various media outlets, advertisers recognize that much of their ad budget is simply wasted. Moreover, it is very difficult to identify and eliminate such waste.
Recently, advertising over more interactive media has become popular. For example, as the number of people using the Internet has exploded, advertisers have come to appreciate media and services offered over the Internet as a potentially powerful way to advertise.
Advertisers have developed several strategies in an attempt to maximize the value of such advertising. In one strategy, advertisers use popular presences or means for providing interactive media or services (referred to as “Websites” in the specification without loss of generality) as conduits to reach a large audience. Using this first approach, an advertiser may place ads on the home page of the New York Times Website, or the USA Today Website, for example. In another strategy, an advertiser may attempt to target its ads to narrower niche audiences, thereby increasing the likelihood of a positive response by the audience. For example, an agency promoting tourism in the Costa Rican rainforest might place ads on the ecotourism-travel subdirectory of the Yahoo Website. An advertiser will normally determine such targeting manually.
Regardless of the strategy, Website-based ads (also referred to as “Web ads”) are often presented to their advertising audience in the form of “banner ads”—i.e., a rectangular box that includes graphic components. When a member of the advertising audience (referred to as a “viewer” or “user” in the Specification without loss of generality) selects one of these banner ads by clicking on it, embedded hypertext links typically direct the viewer to the advertiser's Website. This process, wherein the viewer selects an ad, is commonly referred to as a “click-through” (“Click-through” is intended to cover any user selection). The ratio of the number of click-throughs to the number of impressions of the ad (i.e., the number of times an ad is displayed or otherwise rendered) is commonly referred to as the “click-through rate” or “CTR” of the ad.
A “conversion” is said to occur when a user consummates a transaction related to a previously served ad. What constitutes a conversion may vary from case to case and can be determined in a variety of ways. For example, it may be the case that a conversion occurs when a user clicks on an ad, is referred to the advertiser's Web page, and consummates a purchase there before leaving that Web page. Alternatively, a conversion may be defined as a user being shown an ad, and making a purchase on the advertiser's Web page within a predetermined time (e.g., seven days). In yet another alternative, a conversion may be defined by an advertiser to be any measurable/observable user action such as, for example, downloading a white paper, navigating to at least a given depth of a Website, viewing at least a certain number of Web pages, spending at least a predetermined amount of time on a Website or Web page, etc. Often, if user actions don't indicate a consummated purchase, they may indicate a sales lead, although user actions constituting a conversion are not limited to this. Indeed, many other definitions of what constitutes a conversion are possible. The ratio of the number of conversions to the number of impressions of the ad (i.e., the number of times an ad is displayed or otherwise rendered) is commonly referred to as the conversion rate. If a conversion is defined to be able to occur within a predetermined time since the serving of an ad, one possible definition of the conversion rate might only consider ads that have been served more than the predetermined time in the past.
The hosts of Websites on which the ads are presented (referred to as “Website hosts” or “ad consumers”) have the challenge of maximizing ad revenue without impairing their users' experience. Some Website hosts have chosen to place advertising revenues over the interests of users. One such Website is “Overture.com,” which hosts a so-called “search engine” service returning advertisements masquerading as “search results” in response to user queries. The Overture.com Website permits advertisers to pay to position an ad for their Website (or a target Website) higher up on the list of purported search results. If such schemes where the advertiser only pays if a user clicks on the ad (i.e., cost-per-click) are implemented, the advertiser lacks incentive to target their ads effectively, since a poorly targeted ad will not be clicked and therefore will not require payment. Consequently, high cost-per-click ads show up near or at the top, but do not necessarily translate into real revenue for the ad publisher because viewers don't click on them. Furthermore, ads that viewers would click on are further down the list, or not on the list at all, and so relevancy of ads is compromised.
Search engines, such as Google for example, have enabled advertisers to target their ads so that they will be rendered in conjunction with a search results page responsive to a query that is relevant, presumably, to the ad. Although search result pages afford advertisers a great opportunity to target their ads to a more receptive audience, search result pages are merely a fraction of page views of the World Wide Web.
Some online advertising systems may use ad relevance information and document content relevance information (e.g., concepts or topics, feature vectors, etc.) to “match” ads to (and/or to score ads with respect to) a document including content, such as a Web page for example.
The foregoing ad serving systems can be thought of as keyword-targeted systems (where ads are targeted using terms found in a search query) and content-targeted systems (where ads are targeted using content of a document). Although keyword-targeted and content-targeted ad systems have improved the usefulness of ads, and consequently their performance (e.g., in terms of click-through rate, conversion rate, etc.), there is still plenty of room for improvement. Such improvement can be expected with better targeting.
Some ad servers (e.g., bid management tools) allow advertisers to specify time of day ad targeting. This offers some improvement in ad targeting. Unfortunately, however, time-of-day ad targeting techniques use a fixed time zone in their ad serving determination. Even if such businesses have ads that are relevant to a search query or a Web page, if the end user viewing a search results Web page or the content of a Web page is outside a preferred temporal window, the ads may not be very useful and may not perform well.
Consider, for example, a nationwide courier service that offers package pickup until midnight for next day delivery, while most of their competitors only offer package pickup until 8:00 PM, local time. If such a nationwide courier service wants to advertise on the Internet, the value to them of serving their ads from 7:30 PM to 11:55 PM (or some other time range corresponding to a time when users will not be able to meet an 8:00 PM pickup deadline, but should be able to meet a 12 midnight pickup deadline) might be higher than the value of serving their ads from 9:00 AM to 7:29 PM (because they have less competition after 8:00 PM and customers are likely to use their services that day). However, the value to the courier of serving its ads after 12:00 midnight might drop precipitously since the courier can no longer differentiate its services from its competitors for an end user that needs something to be delivered that day. Note in this example that the value of serving the ads depends on the time for the end user to which the ad will be rendered. For example, an ad touting pickup until midnight may have little value for a user on the east coast at 1:30 AM, but great value for a user on the west coast at 10:30 PM. If, however, the time-of-day is determined merely using a fixed time zone, this great difference in value cannot be used in ad serving.
As another example, advertisers may want to apply audience demographics which are relevant only if the local time of the audience is known. For example, an advertiser may want to increase the score of their ad during lunchtime on weekdays if demographic studies indicate that many people use the Internet to look for personal items during their lunchtime. Suppose an ad server (or a bid manager) is located in the Mountain time zone. At 10:30 AM Mountain time, it is only 9:30 AM Pacific time, but 12:30 PM Eastern time. Thus, at 10:30 AM Mountain time, the advertiser may want to increase the score of its ad for an end user on the east coast, but not for an end user on the west coast.
In view of the foregoing, there is a need for improving the usefulness, and consequently the performance, of advertisements. In particular, there is a need to allow businesses to better target their ads to a responsive audience.