IDENTIFYING WHETHER AN OBJECTIVE INCLUDED IN A CONTENT ITEM PRESENTED BY AN ONLINE SYSTEM WAS PERFORMED WITHOUT THE ONLINE SYSTEM RECEIVING INFORMATION FROM A CLIENT DEVICE IDENTIFYING A USER

摘要

An online system provides content items to client devices for presentation to users and receives information describing actions by users performed by users via the client devices. Certain client devices withhold information uniquely identifying the client devices from the online system to prevent the online system from subsequently identifying a particular user from information uniquely identifying the client device. When the online system receives a description of an action from such a client device that matches an objective included in a content item presented by the online system, the online system identifies users to whom the content item was presented and who are associated with client device characteristics matching characteristics received from the client device. A model is applied by the online system to the identified users that determines a likelihood that at least one of the identified users to whom the content item was presented performed the action.