GB2536645A - System for dynamically generated landing pages - Google Patents

Abstract

A system and method for creating dynamic landing pages based upon information contained within the HTTP referrer header which contains a referring URL and any search terms should the referring web site be a search engine. In particular, advertising may be targeted towards a search engine user 6 by using leaked search terms as keywords to search for products of interest and populate the landing page accordingly. The resulting landing page may thereby comprise more relevant information or advertising and aid in maintaining a users interest or promoting their custom. Furthermore, this configuration overcomes the restrictions in capacity and functionality offered by an advertising campaign server in connection with a search engine.

Description

System for dynamically generated landing pages The invention relates to a system for generating landing pages.

It is known to use landing pages which are individually created for advertising campaigns on the internet. As the landing pages are provided by a third parties' computer system (i.e. by programming), on which a user has limited or no access, the landing pages may not be updated at sufficient speed or in time to react individually to search request submitted by an internet user.

This problem is solved by receiving receive from a search engine application a web page address, the web page address further comprising at least one parameter, the at least one parameter representing a search string with at least one keyword, extracting the at least key word, searching a product data base for products which correspond to the at least one keyword, dynamically inserting information about the product in a web page, and sending the web page to the internet user.

The invention will now be explained in more detail.

The Figures show: Fig. 1 A system of user, a search engine, an advertising server and a landing page server Fig. 2 A data flow diagram in a system of Fig. 1 An advertising campaign launched at a web search machine provider is chosen as an example. A web search engine is a software system that is designed to search for information on the World Wide Web. The search results are generally presented in a line of results often referred to as search engine results pages. The information may be a mix of web pages, images, and other types of files. Search engine providers use large [1] computer farms for running automatic searches to store information about web pages that have been visited by so-called web crawlers. The information stored about a web page includes a uniform resource locator (URL) as a reference to a location on the internet. The URL is presented as a link to the web site from which the information was retrieved, so that a search engine user may directly go to the web site of his interest by clicking on one of the various presented links.

Most of these search engine providers offer this service to their users for free. To cover the costs and to make profits some of these search engine providers offer advertising space, for example so-called banners, for which the subscriber of an electronic advertisement has to pay. Payment can be for example on a so-called pay-per impression or pay-by-click basis. In the simplest form a banner is arbitrarily displayed on the search form or on the page showing the results of a search request. Each time a search engine user, attracted by a banner, clicks on this banner the search engine user is forwarded to the advertisers own web site. Due to the arbitrary character of the banner the click rate, i.e. the number of users clicking on a banner compared to the number of search engine user visiting the web site with the banner advertising is very poor. A search engine user who is looking for laptop computers very unlikely will click on a banner of a travel agency or a drug store.

In response to the low click rate some search engine providers offer more sophisticated opportunities to individualize the displayed advertising information based on the input of a search engine user. For this purpose the subscriber of an advertising campaign may enter one or more keywords and a URL of a website of his own choice, to which a search engine user is forwarded to when he clicks on the individualised advertisement. It has become a common praxis to use specially adopted web pages as a target address, so-called landing pages. A landing page is a single web page that rather than showing the searched key words in their original context if a web page is customized to present specifically only products or services that best fit the searched information. These landing pages are therefore very focused on the search [2] engine users search intent in order to keep the search engine users attention high on a specific product or service. Usually landing pages also provide a link for the visitor to click which will then send the presented product or service to a shopping cart or checkout area. For reasons of simplicity in the following the term article is used to refer to any of the offered products or services. In praxis is almost impossible to individually create a landing page for each article and to register these changes at the search engine as the number of articles can be extremely high, articles may be not in stock or have been discontinued.

The search engine provider may use a separate computer system including a separate data base for organizing the advertising campaigns of advertising subscribers. This dedicated computer system in the following is termed an advertising server. The term advertising subscriber describes in the following users which usually pay for placing advertisements on a search engines providers result pages.

In order to limit the storage capacity of their advertising engines and the speed of selecting an appropriate campaign, some advertising providers limit the number of keywords and the number of web addresses an advertising subscriber can enter for an advertising campaign. Although a typical number of five hundred key words seems to be a big number it has to be kept in mind that the number of products of an internet shop may exceed a number of five hundred articles easily and limit the number of individualized landing pages to that number. For the advertising subscriber therefore his conversion rate, i.e. the number of users buying an article from the internet shop compared to the users being forwarded on an individualized landing page depends to a great extent with witch granularity the information can be offered to a visiting prospect client, i.e. how precisely the information can be fitted to the prospect clients' interests. It has therefore become a need to offer more individualized landing pages to a prospect client than the storage space restrictions of the advertising offer provides.

For an advertising campaign the advertising subscriber has to create at the advertisement server 3 a list of at least one key word and at least one corresponding [3] primary landing page. The list of key words and landing pages may be input to the advertising server 3 via an interface. This interface may be a user interface where personnel of the advertising subscriber type this list on a computer, which is connected via the internet 1 to the advertising server 3. The list may be set up beforehand by the advertising subscriber and transferred to the advertising server 3 via a programming interface, such as a so-called API interface in an appropriate format. In any case, a local list of the input or transferred information respectively is kept on a computer or server used by the advertising subscriber to organize his advertising campaign. Due its function the advertising subscriber's computer or server in the following is referred to as a landing page server 4. In case the landing page server is set up for an earlier created advertising campaign, in another embodiment the landing page server 4 reads a list from the advertising server 3 and stores it in the landing page server 4 as a local copy. This local copy may be used to create for each entry of an advertising campaign an individualised landing page. For example an advertising campaign for a home decoration shop may have five different key words "tables", "chairs", "wardrobes", "lamps", and "kitchen tools". The prepared landing page for "table" may contain especially information for tables, such as how to choose the size of a table, whereas the landing page for "lamps" would provide information for example which power for the light bulbs are recommended for a certain application.

The search engine user 6 for example sends a search request 101 consisting of the key words "dining table" to the search engine server 2. The search engine 2 retrieves from its data base all information about "dining table" and displays this information in ordered form. At the same time the search engine server 3 also sends a second request 102 to the advertising server 3 for looking for the best fitting advertising campaigns. Best fitting may also be best fitting in the eyes of the search engine provider that his earnings are optimised, for example when he uses a bid model where advertising campaigns with the highest bids prevail over other advertising campaigns. The advertising server 3 sends back in a third message 103 information about a selected number of advertising campaigns, including the corresponding URLs. The [4] search engine server 2 arranges the retrieved information and the advertising information in a search result page and sends the search result page 104 to the search engine user 6. In case the search engine user is attracted by one ads and clicks on one of the ads, the search engines users request is forward to the landing page of the landing page server 4.

The advertising server 3 may be configured to provide in the URL of the landing page the keywords searched by the search engine user as a parameter. If not automatically provided the advertising subscriber has to configure the advertising server 3 accordingly. The landing page server extracts from the URL the search string and analyses the key words in an internal search engine. This internal search engine sends a search request 106 to an article data base 5. The article data base 5 sends in a response 107 information for the articles that fit best the original search string of the search engine user 6.

In another embodiment the landing page server collects data of the search strings and/or data from the purchased articles which correspond to a certain search string. This statistical data is used to determine what articles to select for the presentation on the landing page or the order in which the articles are presented. With the statistical data for example products that have become more popular than others are presented and statistically increase the chances that a client is presented the product he was looking for. The present invention thus allows to extend the selection process and to use data for the selection process that would not be available or made available by the advertising provider. With this feature of the invention the selection process can be kept up-to date to current trends.

The landing page server 5 includes the one or the plurality of selected articles in the landing page, i.e. dynamically updates the landing page and sends the individualized landing page back 108 to the search engine user 6. The updated landing page now comprises additional information not only on tables but especially dining tables. For way of example the number of items and landing pages that could be used in an [5] advertising campaign was limited to five articles. By using its own search engine or data retrieval program respectively, the landing page server 4 is able to provide a much bigger number of landing pages, which provide a higher granularity of the provided information. The landing page thus can react dynamically to search requests, for example may put together all information/articles of "oak tables" or "glass tables". Such a granularity is only possible with a dynamic creation of the landing pages. As a matter of fact it is practically impossible to provide for any possible combination of key words in the product data base an individualised landing page in the advertising server 3.

In this example the landing page was already prepared and content was dynamically added. Optionally the landing page may be created dynamically as a whole without pre-prepared content. Depending on the information the search engine server 2 provides the internal search at the landing page server may further optimised. For example some search engine providers may be configured to include in the landing page URL additional information, such as information on the advertising group, which can be used to optimise the selection process.

In an alternative embodiment the article data base comprises only as much information as is needed for the selection process, such as key word and individualised information of the web shop, such as the price of an article. Further information, such as a complete description of the article and images of the article are retrieved from one or more external product data bases. In this embodiment after the landing page search engine has selected one or more articles it sends a request 106 to external product data bases via the internet comprising a code for the product in question, for example a product identifier. After the requested information has been send back form the external product data base 7, this information is compiled with the other information as the individualised landing page. This embodiment had s the advantage that the landing page always presents the most up-to date information. Another advantage is that the article data base can be kept smaller. [6]