Patent ID: 8700462

Claim:
A computerized method for generating one or more media plans for the distribution of one or more advertisements of a campaign, the method comprising: retrieving, from a computer readable medium with a processor of a computing device, an advertiser specified budget for a campaign comprising a plurality of keyword responsive advertisements, a plurality of constraints for each of the plurality of advertisements, and one or more advertiser specified metric target values associated with the campaign, wherein the metric target values are identified with the budget and the constraints, and comprise a first value including an indication of a value of a user selecting an advertisement and adding one or more items to a shopping cart on an advertiser web site, and a second value comprising an indication of a value selected from the group consisting of: displaying the advertisement, a user selection of the advertisement, and a user selecting the advertisement and browsing an advertiser web site associated with the advertisement; generating, using the processor, for each of a plurality of advertisements of the campaign, a forecast of performance of at least one of the metric target values of the advertisement based on the constraints specified by the advertiser and analytics data of the advertisement; retrieving an advertiser specified step, of a plurality of steps in a value funnel, for each of the metric target values of respective advertisements; calculating, using a processor executing a scoring function, an efficiency value for the plurality of advertisements of the campaign, the efficiency value calculated based on a combination of, for respective advertiser specified steps in the value funnel: (i) a forecast of performance of a search term for the advertisement; (ii) the forecast of performance calculated for the at least one of the metric target values; and (iii) a value function applied to the at least one of the metric target values; sorting, using the processor, the plurality of advertisements of the campaign in descending order by efficiency value; determining, using the processor, a forecasted cost for respective advertisements of the campaign based on their bid amounts; and selecting, using the processor and successively from the greatest efficiency values, the sorted advertisements for a media plan until a sum of the forecasted cost of the selected advertisements added to the media plan exhaust the budget of the campaign.