MongoDB Applied Design Patterns

Chapter 7. Online Advertising Networks

In this chapter, we’ll examine building an online advertising network that connects advertisers and media websites. Advertisers provide the ads for display, with each ad designed for a particular ad zone. Media sites, on the other hand, provide content pages for display with various regions marked for serving ads. When the media site displays a page, it makes a request to the ad network for one or more ads to display in its ad zones.

As part of the ad serving, the ad network records the number of pageviews of each ad in order to track statistics for the ad, which may then also be used to bill the advertiser.

Solution Overview

This solution is structured as a progressive refinement of the ad network, starting out with the basic data storage requirements and adding more advanced features to the schema to support more advanced ad targeting. The key performance criterion for this solution is the latency between receiving an ad request and returning the (targeted) ad to be displayed.

Design 1: Basic Ad Serving

A basic ad-serving algorithm consists of the following steps:

1. The network receives a request for an ad, specifying at a minimum the site_id and zone_id to be served.
2. The network consults its inventory of ads available to display and chooses an ad based on various business rules.
3. The network returns the actual ad to be displayed, recording the pageview for the ad as well.

This design uses the site_id and zone_id submitted with the ad request, ...