Online Ads Management Platform
Overview
MediaScale is a digital ads management platform designed to publish, monitor, and automate paid ads on Meta Ads Platform (formerly Facebook).
Problem Statement
The client, being a digital marketing manager themselves, were spending hours every day in the publishing and monitoring process of their digital marketing campaigns. Additionally, there were minimal automations available so they had to perform various actions which, if automated, can save them significant efforts.
Goals and Objectives
- To develop an intuitive platform for publishing digital ad campaigns with higher efficiency.
- To empower users with detailed analytics and monitoring tools for their campaigns.
- To enable automated actions based on user defined rules.
- To allow collaboration within an organization.
Tech Stack
- Backend: Django (Python), Django REST Framework
- Frontend: React
- Database: PostgreSQL
- Cloud Services: AWS S3, Heroku
- Others: Docker, Google & Facebook OAuth 2.0, Facebook Business SDK, Git.
My Role
I was the lead backend engineer responsible for designing the backend architecture, RESTful APIs, and database schema. I was also coordinating with the client and the frontend engineers, along with proper documentations.
Challenges & Solutions
Click Tracking and RoI
Implementation of an advanced automation feature needed granular data points. This information was not available via Meta Ads Platform.
Solution: Built a custom click-tracking and revenue tracking system for ad campaigns, which provided this granular data points. This solution also helped with monitoring ads’ RoI and efficiency.
Unpleasant and Slow UX
To create an Ad campaign on Meta Ads Platform, it requires dozens of data points and even more validations. The usual process of submit, validate and publish caused extremely unpleasant user-experience.
Solution: I implemented a custom validation process and divided it into two stages. A bulk of (faster) validations were done the traditional way, and remaining were executed in a background thread to avoid blocking UI. Additionally, I implemented a few background cron jobs to offload long-running jobs for syncing data.
Outcome & Impact
- Users were able to publish hundreds of ads on Meta Ads Platform at 10x efficiency.
- Advanced automations reduced the need of monitoring campaigns frequently. The system was able to take automated actions based on user-defined triggers.
- Multiple users of an organization could collaborate and view customized reports of their marketing campaigns.
Testimonials
“It was truly a pleasure working with you. You have done such a wonderful job on this project and we appreciate all the things that you did for us! Thank you!”
Reflection
Working on this project deepened my understanding of Meta Ads Platform and Facebook Business SDK. It also taught me the importance of a pleasant user experience and a reliable backend architecture.