With the rapid development of Internet technology, the Internet has become a mainstream marketing medium. Internet advertising offers a number of compelling advantages over traditional advertising formats. In particular, Internet advertising is effective because it is both proactive and interactive. Moreover, advertising over the Internet appeals to a broad and diverse audience but is still relatively inexpensive. Internet advertising has become an increasingly popular choice for companies and merchants because of its high performance-to-price ratio.
Traditionally, Internet advertising systems employ basic query keyword matching to select advertisements for placement. This conventional method for Internet advertisement placement starts by acquiring keywords. The acquired keywords are then used to match and select from a database a set of advertisements for placement. Finally, the selected advertisements are placed onto a webpage.
Advertisements selected according to the conventional method tend to be limited in product range and diversity. For example, a search for “cotton T-shirt” could have relevant advertisements under a number of different product categories such as Women's Apparel, Men's Apparel, Children's Apparel, and Sports Apparel. The conventional method, however, is not guaranteed to select advertisements that would adequately cover the same range and variety of product categories. Consequently, conventionally placed Internet advertisements are ineffective and have low click-through rate. Furthermore, storing and transmitting ineffective advertisements with low click-through rate is a waste of server and network resources.