SYSTEM AND METHOD FOR TARGETING INFORMATION ITEMS BASED ON POPULARITIES OF THE INFORMATION ITEMS

A method of selecting information items in connection with an electronic message includes selecting a plurality of information items satisfying a predefined popularity condition and identifying any one from the selected information items whose associated keyword is found in the electronic message. A set of candidate items are selected periodically based on their respective popularity metrics. The popularity metric of an information item may be its click-through rate during a predefined time period. Each candidate information item has one or more keywords and the number of the keywords found in the electronic message determines the item's relevancy to a user accessing the message. In some embodiments, the method selects a subset of the information items using user geographical information associated with a user accessing the electronic message from a client and at least one of the selected information items is set to target users at a location corresponding to the user geographical information.