Photo Credit: AzDude
Motivation
Automation is the buzz word right now. Advertisers and partners spend hours and hours of their time pouring over campaign performance data and optimizing campaigns. Besides saving a ton of time for the advertisers, setting up automated rules gives the advertisers immediate visibility into potential campaign issues and opportunities, enables them to optimize faster and easier, and have more control over ad spend. Here at Walmart Connect (the retail media/advertising wing of Walmart), we have created Jadoo (Jadoo means magic in the Hindi language), a rule-based framework to power automated rules for campaign optimization.
Sample Rule
The following is a sample of a rule-based automaton powered via Jadoo.
Sample rule creationAs an advertiser, if your campaign is hitting its daily budget of $100 and meeting your performance goal of a $3 ROAS, you can setup an automaton to allocate an additional $50 in daily budget to the campaign, so it continues to be promoted throughout the day while maintaining a $3 ROAS.
Implementation
Jadoo is a plugin-oriented implementation wherein each automated rule is a complete executable unit comprising of three entities, namely query, comparator, and action. Query and action are basically plugins. In addition to these plugins, Jadoo also supports other plugins. Comparator is the boolean condition, complex or simple, that must be evaluated based on the values retrieved by the query plugin, to decide whether the action plugin should be executed or not. The complete list of Jadoo plugins and their responsibilities are as follows.
- Metadata Plugin acts as a helper to fetch data from different systems and present the data on the UI for creating automated rules.
2. Access Plugin helps gather the necessary authentication/authorization required before the queries and actions can be run.
3. Query Plugin acts as the client for querying external systems based on certain input and providing corresponding output from the external system.
- Event based Query is triggered by an outside API specifying some parameters for an event plugin type. If the comparator matches a current trigger (For example, campaign out of budget), the scheduler schedules the trigger to be run.
- Cron based Query runs at a scheduled time ex. 10 AM every day. If any values match the given condition, the values run the actions associated with the trigger (For example, Generation of the Pacing report.).
4. Action plugin takes the values from the Query Plugin and uses them to perform some tasks. Examples include changing bids, sending an email.
Jadoo architectureOnce a Jadoo plugin is coded and well tested, it can be deployed and registered with the Jadoo server and reused multiple times. For example, a Slack notification plugin is written once and reused wherever notifications must be sent via Slack. The pluggability aspect of Jadoo is key to providing the flexibility to change any part (query | condition | action) of an automated rule easily. For example, all notifications sent via email for a specific rule can be sent to a Slack channel/recipient instead, just by switching the action plugin from email to Slack action plugin.
In Sponsored Products Advertising, automated rules have been deployed to increase a campaign’s daily/total budget in real-time to avoid missed advertisement opportunities. In 2022 alone, about 10,000 advertisers have benefited when their campaigns’ budgets have been boosted by 20% when these campaigns ran out of budget.
Conclusion
With its plug and play features and the remarkable success in Sponsored Products Advertising, Jadoo has become the de-facto framework for implementing all rule-based processing including generation of system alerts to automated campaign optimization across all organizations at Walmart Connect.
How Jadoo powers automated campaign optimization at Walmart Advertising! was originally published in Walmart Global Tech Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.