Automated Monitoring and Verification of Internet Based Advertising

Abstract

Method for automatically monitoring and verifying advertising content during a campaign, delivered over a data network. Accordingly, advertisers submit a list of sites, on which the advertising content should be placed according to desired insertion order. Mapping crawlers visit these sites and locate pages with advertisements that belong to required sections, pages that do not belong to the required sections or pages with high probability for incidents. A list of pages to visit per every site is generated and autonomous or plug-in visual crawlers are allowed to visit the list: of pages, according to predetermined site visiting plan. A crawlers' manager allocates the pages between visual crawlers, for obtaining adequate incident coverage and load on the visual crawlers. An incident identifier compares the insertion orders with the delivery data and whenever an insertion order and its corresponding delivery data do not match, an incident report is generated.

1 . A method for automatically monitoring and verifying worldwide compliance with insertion orders of multimedia advertising content during a campaign, delivered over a data network, comprising:
 a) advertiser initiated uploading via said data network by means of a user interface or a software interface of a processor enabled device, of advertisement information according to a predetermined insertion order associated with campaign delivery requirements and a list of sites or of sections per site, to which the advertising content should or should not be provided according to said insertion order;   b) activating a tracking pixel process for tracking web pages containing advertisement parameters;   c) distributing, by means of at least one crawler manager server to a plurality of web crawlers including at least one mapping crawler and at least one visual crawler, crawling tasks with respect to web pages that need to be crawled;   d) activating, by means of said at least one crawler manager server, said plurality of web crawlers so that they will visit said tracked web pages and perform said crawling tasks, according to a predetermined site visiting plan, and will extract visual advertisement related delivery data, contextual delivery data, or metadata related delivery data therefrom;   e) storing said extracted delivery data and data associated with said plurality of web crawlers in a plurality of databases; and   f) by means of at least one incident generator server, comparing, said insertion orders with said extracted delivery data; and   g) generating an incident whenever one of said insertion orders and its corresponding delivery data do not match,
 wherein said at least one visual crawler is used to render a web-page graphically, to identify media types that are displayed on said page, and to check if a HTML tag or a JavaScript tag of said page has certain signatures that define the media as an advertisement. 
   
     
     
         2 . The method according to  claim 1 , wherein the at least one visual crawler is also used to track down a landing page for each identified media type. 
     
     
         3 . The method according to  claim 1 , wherein the at least one visual crawler is also used to find a position on the page and dimensions for each identified media type. 
     
     
         4 . The method according to  claim 1 , wherein the at least one visual crawler is also used to identify an ad server route or a site redirection for each media type. 
     
     
         5 . The method according to  claim 1 , wherein the at least one visual crawler is also used to analyze text and meta-data in the page to find, for each media type, certain predefined keywords that would be used to then classify the page, the site and the associated advertisements. 
     
     
         6 . The method according to  claim 1 , wherein the at least one visual crawler is also used to input user data if required, for each media type, by the site or the page. 
     
     
         7 . The method according to  claim 1 , wherein the delivery data is generated by combining data collected by the tracking pixel process and by the plurality of web crawlers. 
     
     
         8 . The method according to  claim 1 , wherein the delivery data is generated by combining data collected by the tracking pixel process and by the plurality of web crawlers. 
     
     
         9 . A method according to  claim 6 , wherein the user input data includes login parameters or user related data. 
     
     
         10 . A method according to  claim 1 , wherein the tracking pixel process uses the delivery data for detecting the tag ID of the displayed ad. 
     
     
         11 . A method according to  claim 1 , wherein the tracking pixel process uses the delivery data for extracting a path between ad servers, along which an ad is passed until being displayed in a site. 
     
     
         12 . A method according to  claim 1 , wherein the visiting plan includes how many times per day should each page be visited and the start and end date of the campaign. 
     
     
         13 . A method according to  claim 1 , wherein the insertion order information is modified at any time point. 
     
     
         14 . A method according to  claim 1 , wherein the at least one visual crawler performs:
 Session Crawling;   Cookie Crawling;   Contextual Crawling; or   Classification Crawling.   
     
     
         15 . A method according to  claim 1 , wherein the at least one crawler manager server is used to:
 a) intermediate and arbitrate between one or more of the plurality of databases and running crawlers; and   b) retrieve sites or pages that needed to be crawled from said one or more of the plurality of databases and allocate them to different crawlers.   
     
     
         16 . A method according to  claim 1 , wherein the crawler is an autonomous crawler or a plug-in crawler. 
     
     
         17 . A method according to  claim 1 , wherein advertisements or advertisers are recognized according to:
 HTML tags   Flash tags   JavaScript   IFrame that contains other ads inside.   
     
     
         18 . A method according to  claim 1 , wherein advertisements are recognized by:
 a) Identifying all of the tags on the page that correspond to an ad server's signature; and   b) Parsing the tag and extract information such as the URL of the creative file, the landing page, the type of ad, the size of the ad and the advertising category.   
     
     
         19 . A data processing system for automatically verifying worldwide compliance with insertion orders of multimedia network advertising delivered over a data network, said data processing system comprising:
 a) at least one ad server for storing, delivering and uploading advertisements according to a predetermined insertion order via said data network;   b) a tracking pixel server for tracking web pages containing advertisement parameters;   c) a plurality of web crawlers including at least one mapping crawler and at least one visual crawler, for extracting visual advertisement related information from said tracked web pages according to a predetermined site visiting plan;   d) at least one mediator server for distributing, to said plurality of web crawlers, crawling tasks with respect to web pages that need to be crawled and for determining a status of each of said plurality of web crawlers;   e) a plurality of databases in which is stored said extracted visual advertisement related information and data associated with said plurality of web crawlers; and   f) at least one incident generator server for analyzing said extracted visual advertisement related information and reporting thereby incidents of non-compliance with respect to said insertion order,
 wherein said at least one visual crawler is used to render a web-page graphically and to generate a hierarchical representation of said page based on a HTML text of said page. 
   
     
     
         20 . A data processing system for automatically verifying worldwide compliance with insertion orders of multimedia network advertising delivered over a data network, said data processing system comprising:
 a) at least one ad server for storing, delivering and uploading advertisements according to a predetermined insertion order via said data network;   b) a tracking pixel server for tracking web pages containing advertisement parameters;   c) a plurality of web crawlers including at least one mapping crawler and at least one visual crawler, for extracting visual advertisement related information from said tracked web pages according to a predetermined site visiting plan;   d) at least one mediator server for distributing, to said plurality of web crawlers, crawling tasks with respect to web pages that need to be crawled and for determining a status of each of said plurality of web crawlers;   e) a plurality of databases in which is stored said extracted visual advertisement related information and data associated with said plurality of web crawlers; and   f) at least one incident generator server for analyzing said extracted visual advertisement related information and reporting thereby incidents of non-compliance with respect to said insertion order,
 wherein said at least one visual crawler is used to render a web-page graphically, to identify media types that are displayed on said page, and to check if a HTML tag or a JavaScript tag of said page has certain signatures that define the media as an advertisement.