Abstract: The present disclosure provides methods and apparatus for estimating advertisement impressions and advertiser search share. These estimates are improved by eliminating duplicate traffic based on similar words having similar traffic estimates. In addition, coverage is estimated for a particular advertiser keywords using statistical sampling. This coverage estimate is then used as a weighing factor when estimating traffic for an entire business category (e.g., group of keywords) by squaring the individual traffic estimates, summing the squared estimates, and then taking the square root of that sum.

Abstract: The present disclosure provides a system that filters out underperforming ads from a historical database of ads and leaves the most effective ads by applying three separate filters. The first filter removes ineffective ads based on coverage. Coverage is the percentage of the time that an ad appears for a given keyword. The second filter removes ads which appear below some threshold position (e.g., position five in Google), because many search engines reward ads with high clickthrough rates with a position bonus. The third filter removes ads which have not run some minimum threshold period of time (e.g., four weeks). Advertisers may then view the remaining ads (i.e., the effective ads) associated with keywords of interest and mine those ads for words to be used in their own ad copy.