Advertisement budgets are often apportioned over an advertisement period, such as apportioning fixed increments of the budget over subperiods of the advertisement period. Each allocation of the budget may be used for auctions of advertisement opportunities during the subperiod. However, fixed apportioning may not be responsive to the actual user response, and manual adjustment of the budget may provide an efficient allocation in view of an advertiser's response target, resulting in overspending, underspending (wherein resulting user response fails to meet a response target), and/or inefficient allocation of the budget. Instead, a server may measure the user response during a first advertisement subperiod, extrapolate the user response over the advertisement period, and compare the extrapolated user response to the response target. Based on the comparison, budget allocation during a second advertisement subperiod may be adjusted by an allocation offset that adapts the allocation of the advertisement budget to the response target.

Advertising and search is performed using temporal parameters of stories, events, topics and electronic documents. The contents of a document relating to an event/topic is analyzed to identify temporal components. These components can be compared with corresponding counterparts in other documents to identify a relative temporal order, and to help drive an advertising engine or search engine.

The disclosed computer system provides a selectively programmed Web architecture that implements a procedure and method for selectively serving to a Web page one or more electronic ads wherein the selection process is governed in part by application of a statistical algorithm. In a preferred embodiment of the inventive technology, the system manages and serves electronic ads for affiliated Web page publishers and advertisers. A computer-implemented method in accordance with the disclosed technology receives a request for an electronic advertisement for a Web page, wherein the Web page is associated with a Web page publisher, one or more electronic ads are selected using a statistics based approach, and the one or more electronic ads are communicated to the Web page for display.

A system and process to determine the causal relationship between advertisement delivery data and sales data are disclosed. According to one embodiment, a method comprises importing advertisement data and sales data. The advertisement data and the sales data are joined to generate a joined data set. Customer journeys are generated for a timeframe from the joined data set. A first group of customers who saw an advertisement of interest are identified. A second group of customers who did not see the advertisement of interest are identified. Each customer of the first group is matched to a customer in the second group who is similar to the customer of the first group. An average treatment effect for the advertisement of interest is calculated.

Methods, apparatus, systems and articles of manufacture are disclosed to determine advertisement campaign effectiveness using covariate matching. An example method includes segregating, by executing an instruction with a processor, a data structure into treatment groups and covariate groups, the data structure including an index of sales associated with an advertisement campaign, reducing a bias associated with the covariate groups by applying, by executing an instruction with the processor, anentropy optimization to determine a first balancing factor for a first covariate group of the covariate groups based on a geometric mean of a first subset of treatment groups associated with the covariate groups and determining, by executing an instruction with a processor, a first balanced weight for a first sale of the index of sales based on (a) the first balancing factor and (b) a first sampling weight of the first sale, the first sale associated with the first covariate group and a first treatment group of the first subset of treatment groups, the first sale associated with a first response. The example method includes determining, by executing an instruction with a processor, a first aggregate response of the first treatment group based a sum of products of (1) a first set of balanced weights associated with the first treatment group and (2) a first set of responses associated with the first treatment group, the first set of balanced weights including the first balanced weight, the first set of responses including the first response and reducing computing resource waste by modifying, by executing an instruction with a processor, computing resource allocation to the advertisement campaign based on the first aggregate response.

Embodiments of system are disclosed in which selection strategies for a direct marketing campaign that identify consumers from a credit bureau or other consumer database can be planned, tested, and/or refined on a stable subset of the credit database. In some embodiments, once refined, consumer selection criteria may be used to execute the direct marketing campaign on the full consumer/credit database, which is preferably updated approximately twice weekly. In one preferred embodiment, the data for the test database represents a random sampling of approximately 10% of the full database and the sampling is regenerated approximately weekly in order to provide a stable set of data on which campaign developers may test their campaign. For each consumer in the sampling, the environment may allow a client to access and use both attributes calculated by the credit bureau and proprietary attributes and data owned by the client. The system allows for a plurality of clients to use the system substantially simultaneously while protecting the privacy and integrity of the client's proprietary data and results.

A system and method enable exploration of cold ads in an online information system. Cold ads are ads that are new to the system and do not yet have reliable click through rate (CTR) estimates or click probabilities. The method and system selectively boost the click probabilities of cold ads to increase their likelihood of participating in and winning an auction so that the cold ad get more impressions, but without adversely affecting revenue in a production environment when cold ads are introduced.

A method and apparatus for managing and integrating lead sources for a marketing/advertisement campaign on a platform that allocates and optimizes lead source budgets and provides a customer service and payment processing function. The present technology as disclosed and claimed herein provides a platform that is a customer retention and customer management system that is automated to provide lead estimations and optimizations to allocate and optimize lead source budgets where the system has a learning function that improves over time.

A system and method for performing cross-platform data analytics of advertising campaign information. The system comprises a data sanitizing module for receiving information related to at least one campaign from a plurality of advertising platforms and to produce a normalized dataset having data values that comply with a unified format; a storage and transformation (TS) engine for transforming data values in the normalized dataset into a format defined in a relaxed data schema, thereby resulting with a relaxed dataset, the TS engine is further configured to analyze the relaxed dataset to compute a plurality of campaign measurements of measurable data values included in the relaxed dataset; a data-mart module for storing the relaxed dataset together with the computed campaign measurements; and a management user interface (UI) module for allowing client devices access to data stored in the data-mart module, wherein the data-mart module is optimized for providing an accelerated data for data stored therein.

Methods, systems, and apparatus, including computer programs encoded on a computer storage medium, for managing application program interface calls.