Architectural Components

Architecture

Let’s have a look at the high-level architecture of the system. There will be two main actors involved in our ad prediction system - platform users and advertiser. Let’s see how they fit in the architecture:

1. Advertiser flow

Advertisers create ads containing their content as well as targeting, i.e., scenarios in which they want to trigger their ads. A few examples are:

• Query-based targeting: This method shows ads to the user based on the query terms. The query terms can be a partial match, full match, expansion, etc.
  For example, whenever a user types a query “machine learning course”, the system shows the ML course on educative.io.

• User-based targeting: The ads will be subjective to the user based on a specific region, demographic, gender, age, etc.

• Interest-based targeting: This method shows interest-based ads. Assume that on Facebook, the advertiser might want to show ads based on certain interest hierarchies. For example, the advertiser might like to show sports-related ads to people interested in sports.

• Set-based targeting: This type shows ads to a set of users selected by the advertisers. For example, showing an ad to people who were previous buyers or have spent more than ten minutes on the website. Here, we can expand our set and do seed audience expansion.

2. User flow

As the platform user queries the system, it will look for all the potential ads that can be shown to this user based on different targeting criteria used by the advertiser.

So, the flow of information will have two major steps as described below:

• Advertisers create ads providing targeting information, and the ads are stored in the ads index.
• When a user queries the platform, ads can be selected from the index based on their information (e.g., demographics, interests, etc.) and run through our ads prediction system.