Patent ID: 8392345

Claim:
A computer system for coordinating the systematic variation of content delivered to users via a digital data network during interactive sessions between the users and a plurality of external content systems external to the computer system, the computer system comprising: a processor; an experiment engine executed by the processor to generate a unique set of tracking codes to allow the plurality of external content systems to pass back information about the users to a rules generator, the rules generator to receive the passed back information to determine an optimal content element to be delivered by each of the plurality of external content systems; one or more sets of rules to: provide systematic variation of content in digital, perceptibly-renderable treatments for presentation to users of an external content system; determine how the treatments will be rendered to users across each external content system; determine how the experiment will be tracked across systems; and deliver the treatments with the variations of content to the users; the rules generator executed by the processor to deliver one or more of the sets of rules as specific programmatic commands to the plurality of external content systems via the digital network and receive the passed back information; a data collator to: automatically access and collect in real-time, data from the plurality of external content systems on at least one of a number of times that each treatment is presented and what users did when presented with a treatment; and combine the collected data and additional information, including a source of the data, into a single data file for processing by the processor by matching the collected data according to the unique set of tracking codes generated by the experiment engine; and a plurality of plug-ins to allow the computer system to communicate with the plurality of external content systems, the plurality of plug-ins to translate the one or more sets of rules into a form executable by different ones of the plurality of external content systems.