Preface

Just as the steam engine opened the steam age, electricity opened the electrical age, and the computer opened the information age, when the cloud became the underlying infrastructure of "hydroelectricity, coal" that swept across thousands of industries, a new era was also coming.

As an enterprise that provides marketing and promotion services to customers around the world, eclicktech has a deep experience and feelings about this.

As a technology-driven development company, eclicktech's business started in 2011. It mainly provides integrated marketing and promotion services for global customers, which can help companies acquire users more efficiently on a global scale, enhance brand awareness, and realize commercialization. . Since its establishment, eclicktech has more than 600 employees, 10 offices around the world, business in 235 countries and regions around the world, covering more than 7 billion devices worldwide, serving more than 2,000 customers, and helping advertisers bring More than 500 million related users, including a series of conversion services such as downloads, installations, and e-commerce commitments.

According to Wang Yizhou, co-founder and CTO of eclicktech, since there was no real mobile Internet in 2011, eclicktech's business at that time still started from the traditional Internet. However, in 2013, the company cut off all traditional Internet business and focused on global advertising and marketing for the entire mobile terminal, becoming one of the few companies in the world that focused on mobile terminal business at that time.

It is this strategic transformation that eclicktech has helped many customers usher in rapid development. Take the well-known Cheetah Mobile as an example. In just one year, eclicktech helped it acquire hundreds of millions of users worldwide. By the time Cheetah Mobile went public, more than half of Cheetah Mobile's users were acquired globally through eclicktech.

In 2015, eclicktech and Amazon Cloud Technology reached a formal cooperation. "Unlike many companies buying their own servers and doing IDC hosting, eclicktech has never built its own IDC since the first day of its birth. It is a true cloud-native enterprise. Because we are doing global business, very It is difficult to go to hundreds of countries around the world to find local suppliers for cooperation, so we chose Amazon Cloud Technology in the selection of cloud at that time, and it was only in 2015 that the two parties established an official deep cooperation relationship." Technology revealed, "We mainly use our self-developed series of cloud platforms, tools, and products to help advertisers achieve their business goals in so many countries and so many devices around the world."

In 2017, eclicktech's business has gained an excellent reputation and a leading position in the entire industry worldwide. According to the monitoring data of AppsFlyer, a global mobile advertising monitoring company, eclicktech ranks 12th in the overall list of global mobile advertising platforms, and is ranked first in Asia. In 2018, eclicktech was selected as a Chinese unicorn company, and it is the only Internet unicorn company in the entire Northwestern District. In the same year, the company joined the IAB Global Advertising Alliance, participated in the formulation of the entire digital advertising standard, and won the Google Greater China Mobile Advertising Innovation Award, Google Greater China Online Business Development Award and other awards. In 2019, eclicktech has further become an advanced partner of the Amazon Cloud Technology Partner Network (APN).

Although eclicktech's business has achieved rapid development and outstanding performance after the comprehensive transformation of the mobile Internet, Wang Yizhou admitted that the company has also encountered many challenges in the process of developing global business.

First, eclicktech will serve customers in more than 200 countries and regions, as well as 7 billion devices distributed in every corner of the world. Within such a wide geographical scope, in the face of different infrastructure architectures, different network quality, and equipment quality, how can we provide the audience with a more consistent service experience?

Second, unlike traditional brand advertisements that only require users to see, eclicktech’s main business is actually performance advertising, requiring users not only to watch, but also to convert, download, install, and even pay, otherwise the company will have no business income. This puts forward more stringent requirements on advertising effects. Therefore, how to increase intelligent marketing capabilities in a true sense, truly achieve precision marketing, and bring tangible results to advertisers, has always been the core challenge of eclicktech.

Third, as many as 7 billion devices means that there are hundreds of billions of data in the cloud every day or even larger-scale advertising visits, and the resulting PB-level massive data. Faced with such a large volume and scale of data access, how to realize global and cross-regional data management? How to mine based on data? How to deal with sudden data peaks? These are no small problems for enterprises.

Fourth, eclicktech does performance marketing, which is to recommend lipstick to people who need to buy lipstick and Tesla to people who need to buy a car. But in many cases, users' willingness to consume is not always exposed on the Internet. For example, even if you know that a user's hobby is cars, it is difficult to know from the beginning whether he likes Tesla or Porsche. Therefore, eclicktech's daily business operation is not a one-shot sale based on guesswork, but a process of continuous experimentation, tuning, and finding the optimal solution. It requires data feedback for the market all the time to adjust the next step in time. Market launch strategy, the pursuit of better market feedback.

If you follow the traditional corporate office method, after a lot of data collection, statistics, calculations, and analysis, you can see the data report the next day is already very efficient. However, for eclicktech, facing the massive data of up to PB level, and it also requires the completion of statistical analysis at the millisecond level, in order to adjust the market strategy in time, this kind of work is obviously impossible to complete by manpower.

Faced with such problems and challenges, there is one and only one solution, and that is AI artificial intelligence.

"With the development of the industry and the evolution of technology, we have increasingly found that people are only required to complete all the work. Although the degree of refinement is the highest, the efficiency is not the best. Especially in the larger and larger business Under the circumstances, AI has become the best choice." Wang Yizhou said.

The core of AI is algorithms and models. In the process of AI model training, in the face of TB or even PB level of data volume and scale, how to speed up the training process, how to reduce waste of resources, including how to disassemble video ads, how to optimize videos, and how to set up Cloud architecture...This requires that the cloud server selected by eclicktech has powerful functions.

Wang Yizhou said, “In the past five years, we have mainly done three core solutions: cloud native + containerization + serverless. Taken together, these solutions and tools are not only stable, reliable, and usable, but also It has helped us greatly reduce the cost of operating and maintaining new technologies, and the overall operating cost has been reduced by approximately 65%."

In addition, since there is no need to build the entire environment from scratch, the online speed of projects like Yidian Tianxia has been about twice as fast as previously expected.

"Eclicktech has achieved remarkable results in reducing operating costs and accelerating project development. In the future, our core focus will still be on AI and machine learning, and will focus on everything from video production creation and circulation to advertising and optimization. , The entire link and all links will make a lot of investment." Wang Yizhou revealed.