Patent ID: 7324964

Claim:
A system for quantifying the effectiveness of advertising using an online merchant system that facilitates commercial transactions involving commerce items, comprising: a commerce item information receiving system that is accessible by at least one online entity that may interface with the commerce item information system to deliver a data feed comprised of plurality of commerce item information packets that relate to commerce items that can be shopped for by online users via the online merchant system, the commerce item information receiving system under hardware and software control to: receive, map, and store each commerce item information packet into an aggregate database using a common commerce item information format; and associate a commerce item information tag to each commerce item information packet stored within the aggregate database; the system for quantifying the effectiveness of advertising further comprising: a commerce metric recording system, accessible to a vendor, that records commerce metrics related to the online activity regarding any particular commerce item by recording queries of the aggregate database regardless of whether the query represents a sale returning a specific unit of commerce item information and the associated commerce item information tag; and an advertising system, configured to generate and record commerce metrics for tracking the effectiveness of advertising.