Obtaining data from abandoned electronic forms
AssigneeMov Digital Media, Inc.
InventorsThomas Chow Ling, III, Peter Iveson Norton
Life of this patent
Estimating the term…
Abstract
Visitors that abandon electronic or computer-generated forms before completing and submitting the form are lost to business entities. Data obtained from abandoned electronic or computer-generated forms is used to identify these lost visitors. Sometimes a unique script embedded on the webpages scrapes the data from the forms. The obtained data is further utilized to market or remarket to the lost consumers by sending personalized messages via a preferred communication medium.
Claims15
A method to obtain data from abandoned electronic forms, the method comprising:
- determining that an electronic form accessed by a user has been abandoned by the user, the electronic form having embedded computer-executable instructions and one or more fields configured to accept user-entered text, the electronic form comprising at least one hypertext markup language (HTML) element associated with the one or more fields, the at least one HTML element having at least one attribute;
- obtaining data from the abandoned electronic form with the embedded computer-executable instructions by building a data structure based on the abandoned electronic form and parsing the data structure to obtain the at least one HTML element;
- and
- storing one or more of the at least one HTML element, the at least one attribute, and the user-entered text.
An apparatus to obtain data from abandoned electronic forms, the apparatus comprising:
- computer hardware configured to determine that an electronic form accessed by a user has been abandoned by the user, the electronic form having embedded computer-executable instructions and one or more fields configured to accept user-entered text, the electronic form comprising at least one hypertext markup language (HTML) element associated with the one or more fields, the at least one HTML element having at least one attribute;
- computer hardware configured to obtain data from the abandoned electronic form with the embedded computer-executable instructions by building a data structure based on the abandoned electronic form and parse the data structure to obtain the at least one HTML element;
- and
- computer hardware configured to store one or more of the at least one HTML element, the at least one attribute, and the user-entered text.
Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.