Media properties selection method and system based on expected profit from profile-based ad delivery

What is this patent about?

’783 is related to the field of behavioral targeting and electronic advertisement placement. In the digital advertising ecosystem, behavioral targeting (BT) companies track user actions across various websites to build profiles that help advertisers deliver relevant content. A significant technical challenge in this field is the efficient synchronization of these profiles across different domains, as security protocols generally prevent one website from reading cookies or tags set by another. This often results in inefficient ad spend where the cost of reaching a specific user on a secondary site exceeds the value of the advertisement itself.

The underlying idea behind ’783 is to automate the selection of secondary media properties for ad delivery based on a real-time financial feasibility analysis. Rather than indiscriminately tagging users for retargeting across all available partner sites, the system evaluates the expected profit of a potential ad placement before initiating the tagging process. By calculating the delta between what an advertiser is willing to pay for a specific profile attribute and the cost of ad space on a third-party site, the system ensures that the technical overhead of cookie matching and ad serving is only incurred when a positive margin is anticipated.

The claims of ’783 focus on a method and system for authorizing third-party media properties to display advertisements based on profile attributes collected from a first media property. The independent claims specifically describe a process where a visitor is identified at an initial site, and the system automatically authorizes subsequent media properties to serve ads to that visitor. Crucially, this authorization is contingent upon a price-based filter, where the price charged by the third-party media property must be less than the profile-attribute-dependent price an advertiser is willing to pay for that specific visitor.

In practice, the invention operates as a gatekeeper for the cookie-matching process. When a visitor performs a high-value action—such as searching for a mortgage or airline tickets—the system calculates the anticipated revenue by multiplying the advertiser's bid by the expected click-through rate. It then compares this value against the known costs of various ad networks and publishers. If the cost of the secondary media property is too high to sustain a profit, the system may choose not to tag the visitor for that specific property, thereby optimizing the computational and financial resources of the BT company.

This approach differentiates itself from prior art, such as standard retargeting services, by moving the economic decision-making to the point of initial profile collection. Traditional systems typically tag users first and worry about the cost of the ad space later, often leading to negative-margin placements. By integrating a profit-based selection mechanism directly into the tagging workflow, the invention allows for more granular control over retargeting campaigns, ensuring that high-cost ad inventory is only utilized for the most valuable user profiles while lower-value profiles are directed toward more affordable media properties.