Design an ad click tracking system

Q: Design an ad click tracking system

This question evaluates a candidate's ability to architect a high-throughput, reliable ad event tracking system, including event modeling, streaming and batch processing, storage selection, deduplication, attribution logic, and operational monitoring.

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Question

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Design a system to track ad impressions and clicks and support:

Online serving / real-time analytics
- Near-real-time counters (e.g., clicks per campaign/creative, CTR) with low latency.
- Dashboards that can filter by time window, campaign, geo, device, etc.
Offline/batch reporting & billing
- Accurate daily aggregates for invoicing.
- Ability to reprocess data if attribution rules change.
Attribution & deduplication
- Deduplicate repeated events (retries, double clicks, client re-sends).
- Attribute clicks to impressions (e.g., last-touch within a time window).
Scale & reliability
- Very high write QPS, bursty traffic.
- No event loss; tolerate partial outages.
Abuse/fraud considerations
- Basic detection signals and rate limiting.

Explain APIs/events, data model, storage choices, streaming/batch pipelines, consistency tradeoffs, and key metrics/alerts.

Design an ad click tracking system

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Design an ad click tracking system

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