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The role of traditional venue in the promotion process

Each time, in order to enable consumers to quickly select products and interact with the platform in marketing, there will be a page to carry the core content and main marketing elements of the promotion, which we call the main venue. Before the development of the main venue, are the front end through the page building system or through the source code to make PC pages and H5 pages, and the main venue material pictures are from the official material. The system decides who is displayed in the pit according to certain business rules, and the user needs to browse from a tree structure level by level to the final baby page. Through the data comparison of the previous main venue, the wireless main venue structure has a higher miss rate and less efficiency than PC pages.

Wireless main venue target

In the trend of wireless becoming the mainstream, it is necessary to improve the efficiency of the main venue of wireless, and two problems need to be solved technically and professionally:

  1. In the mobile terminal, users can find the content they are interested in more quickly, improve traffic matching and efficient distribution, reduce the user miss rate, and thus improve the conversion rate

  2. At the business level, it can respond to any business changes and adjust according to different needs to ensure the big promotion

response

In view of the above objectives, it can be solved from the following aspects:

  • The ultimate browsing experience, mainly from the performance and experience to achieve the best

  • It gives priority to the content users are interested in by thousands of people, breaks the browsing mode of tree structure, and reduces the miss rate

  • Improve conversion rate consistently through the first graph

  • To meet the requirements of service flexibility, dynamically configurable service frameworks and traffic allocation rules are implemented

In order to improve our browsing experience and reduce the rate of miss, a series of new design and solutions were adopted, including a reusable venue framework and a complete set of photo synthesis mechanism.

Reusable venue framework

In order to maximize users’ browsing experience, we abandoned the traditional H5 main venue and adopted a native page venue. From a technical point of view, the main challenges facing the wireless main venue:

  • At the end, it mainly involves version release, change cost, personalized performance guarantee, offline cache & synchronization policy, and end-to-end monitoring

  • In the cloud, traffic deployment and stability are the main tasks. End-to-end stability and DISASTER recovery policies must be ensured

  • The diversity of material sources ensures the cloud material processing ability, personalized real-time computing ability and consistent link transparent transmission of the first image

  • Comprehensive monitoring system from end to cloud

In the face of these challenges, we meet these capabilities from the following main modules:

Flexible framework containers and multiple policy adjustments

For better user experience, the whole venue is contained in a venue frame, which is composed of dynamic rendering area and frame container. Through WEEX(WEEX is a new mobile development platform provided by Ali Wireless to generate native experience through HTML5 cross-platform interpretation in the client) rendering engine to meet dynamic, based on WEB technology development, no need to release and have native experience. The frame container is used to control the top and bottom TAB parts. The goal is to design and realize a standard and universal venue framework, and the display elements and behaviors of the end and side can be flexibly adjusted through configuration, so as to meet the requirements of different stages of promotion activities such as Double 11, Double 12 and mid-year promotion. The whole structure of the main venue is disassembled as follows:



For the conference frame container, the cloud configuration controls the navigation actions and response processing on the client, and the number, visual style and response behavior of navigation tabs are flexibly rendered based on the cloud configuration metadata at the end and side. At the same time, the user experience compatibility of different terminal devices is considered to control the behavior of content pages in the container in a more fine-grained manner. The policy center of the conference framework can change various policies based on user information (such as APP version, model, and OS version) and take effect for specific user groups.

Dynamic page (WEEX) data acquisition within the framework container, similar to traditional static H5 pages. From the perspective of user experience, CDN nodes are directly deployed for default page resources based on the principle of data proximity to users. Considering that the page content involves personalization, local data needs to be dynamically acquired in real time. This scheme adopts page framework and static data to be statically deployed to CDN, local dynamic content, and directly invokes cloud service for asynchronous filling. In the design phase, synchronization considers the failure of pulling static files in extreme cases. At the same time, the cloud needs to be compatible to support such a small amount of traffic to return full page data. To sum up, the data link and rendering process of the overall venue framework are as follows:



Personalized data is pulled by users when they enter the page. How can users feel that they have the same experience as the content they get from nearby places? Dynamic personalized data asynchronous rendering can improve the speed of page opening, but in terms of user visual experience, dynamic and static data separation and asynchronous rendering will lead to delayed data loading and display in local areas of the page and static page opening. Low-end models under the screen flicker or refresh the sense of frustration is obvious. In order to achieve the ultimate user experience, take account of page loading speed and page data integrity, with the help of rich client capabilities, the venue framework adopts end-to-end preheating technology to ensure better user experience.

Compared with traditional pages that rely on the client to actively pull data from the server, the end-to-end preheating technology, with the help of the mobile terminal data push service, gives priority to read the pre-cached content on the end when users visit and render the page, which not only reduces the peak demand of the server, but also guarantees the user experience of loading and rendering the whole page. The Data push Service of the venue framework adopts Ali Cloud Data Service (ACDS)SDK independently developed by Xiaotao to realize the transparent Service of end-to-end Data reading, Cloud synchronization, Data fusion and remote process call, which greatly reduces the complexity of client processing and improves development efficiency. With the help of cloud control policy, the venue framework can flexibly switch between cloud push and end pull modes. The general process is as follows:



Based on the above module capabilities, and considering the promotion, warm-up, formalization, and end of the overall life cycle of the event, the page/module switchover capability required by the operation should be timely or real-time. Unified control and real-time deployment of the global URL blocking strategy of the venue should be carried out at the framework level. To address this feature, the conference framework uses custom blocking rules and delivers URL policies based on cloud control. Requests from different targets in different time periods can be monitored and intercepted to the conference framework for corresponding TAB processing. These requests can be configured based on different triggers and target addresses. The overall processing flow of time-based interception rules is as follows:



Finally, personalized Settings, when hundreds of millions of users based on the blocking rule into the corresponding access page, need according to the business strategy will be the overall flow and ratio of flexible page each resources and content, which can strictly guarantee business in the flow rate and total demand, and to ensure users have always been able to see the suitable goods/marketing content and more efficient to complete the conversion. To that end, let’s first look at the so-called personalized content area:



Some of the main concepts: The menswear in the picture represents a floor with 7 pits in each floor. Thousand thousand faces (personalization) is to display different contents and floor order according to different users’ preferences combined with big data prediction. Therefore, for different users, the brand, store, commodity and selling point information exposed under the same resource location may be different, and the picture material displayed will combine different commodities and selling points under the same brand according to user preferences, so different users may see different commodities of the same brand, or even different selling points of the same commodity. For this purpose, a large number of materials and original marketing information should be prepared in advance and processed dynamically by algorithms and big data processing engines, which will be introduced in separate chapters later.

On the basis of individuation, considering the operation control strategy of different floors, some floors may not output personalized content for some users, but only put fixed data filled by operation manual. Such data and floors are called non-personalized data. Considering flexibility, real-time traffic control should be implemented for different floors, allowing the proportion of personalized and non-personalized traffic of a floor to be controlled. At the same time, the order of each floor can also be set to be personalized and the proportion of personalized order, so as to flexibly cope with the variability and stability of business.

Finally, in order to further improve the efficiency of user selection and improve the click effect, this conference extension has realized the consistency of the first picture. That is, users are interested when they see the guide material (for a certain commodity) in the resource bit entrance. After clicking into the bearing page, they can see the clicked content in the list of the page in the first time (based on the content promotion and drainage strategy of the page producer, the corresponding commodity may not be on the first screen). In order to achieve the best user click conversion and selection experience. Therefore, the overall personalized link synchronization of the venue realizes the consistent processing of the first graph corresponding to the previous entry of the next hop.

Stability guarantee

Based on the above venue framework design, it basically meets the multi-dimensional requirements of traffic matching and user experience in various large-scale promotion business scenarios. Next, the focus is on ensuring the stability of the overall architecture. In the first place, you need to improve the overall link monitoring capability of the venue to quickly troubleshoot and locate faults on the client version running online and the corresponding server logic. To this end, all links of the whole link of the venue were carefully monitored:

Client monitoring

Considering the possibility of various errors such as end-to-end dynamic script anomalies, data processing process accidents, page data loading errors, cache and request channel anomalies, we need to ensure that how can we timely find the end-to-end testing problems under 100 million UV/PV page views? And what exactly happened? Therefore, the venue framework combined with the on-end rendering engine adopts the independently developed on-end monitoring platform to monitor the end-to-end performance of the main venue, which is subdivided into data acquisition, data processing, data rendering, node operation and other core links (including JS execution error, FAILURE rate of CDN pulling JS, crash rate of the venue and success rate of DOM operation). By collecting such monitoring point data and combining with the degraded strategy of the venue framework on the end, the overall stability of the venue is ensured.

The cloud monitoring

At the server level, the main core of the business perspective is to ensure the success rate of personalized data acquisition and accuracy of traffic control. At the same time, there is content anomaly monitoring (data is empty or data fragment is missing) on the side of the big data algorithm to ensure the overall link effect.

Based on the above design and implementation, the venue framework is basically perfect. Marketing perspective, the core of the framework carrying traffic or content. The so-called clever housewife can make bricks without straw, personalized thousands of faces, to achieve the big data effect of the mobile era, rely on the following set of new tools to complete.

Reusable venue framework material source important support – combined graph

As mentioned above, thousands of people are facing unprecedented challenges in the complexity of the content and the magnitude of the calculation. For this reason, the main personalized venue of the Double Eleven has derived a horizontal innovative product — Joint map. As mentioned above, all the pictures of the conference are from official materials (made by merchants or designers). After the comprehensive upgrade to personalized venue, the requirements of the material library also changed dramatically. If personalized recommendations are compared to a heavy weapon in the era of big data, then the image material library is like an Arsenal of heavy weapons. Personalized recommendation can start, hit how fierce, first of all to see the quality of commodity material is not good enough, the quantity is not enough. The reason is simple, each consumer is unique, personalized recommendation to meet the preferences of thousands of consumers, of course, you have to have thousands of products first. Faced with a large number of users on Singles’ Day, no recommendation algorithm can exert its power if the material can not be handled properly.



Traditional operational delivery is like a revolver, relying on operational experience to hit consumer preferences. And personalized recommendation is based on massive data, for each user to customize his own double 11. After preliminary evaluation, if the personalized main venue wants to achieve effect in a scene of the magnitude of Double Eleven, the number of pictures in this material library needs to be at least one million. If merchants or designers are asked to make this “Arsenal”, it is obviously mission Impossible.

  1. Baby picture and interest point text merged into a whole picture output, reduce client rendering pressure.

  2. The main venue picture display personalized, need to prepare millions of levels of material pictures.

For the above objectives, we need a high-quality, large-scale, structured, and production of pictures. In this context, our combined graph system came into being.

Problems to be dealt with in the combined graph system:

  • Picture quality, mass picture screening, face recognition, psoriasis, non white background badcase.

  • Abstract template flexible DSL language expression, designers can operate modification, adjustment.

  • The composite graph service produces standard images based on DSL template definitions.

  • Picture quality: The pictures of the venue of Double Eleven are mainly from materials submitted by businesses, which are uneven in quality and cannot be used directly. Therefore, targeted filtering is needed. For example, because of copyright, we cannot directly use pictures with faces. The PC era merchants habitual pictures with psoriasis case also need to be able to filter, as well as the basic image is clear, and so on, according to these requirements, we will launch a predefined for each image of a variety of image processing, the output semantic tagging based on image content, complete the automatic image tag process, according to the characteristics of the filter in order to facilitate or the required material in advance.

  • Abstract template: Double eleven venue pit has a variety of sizes, a variety of layouts. We created a set of domain specific language (DSL) for graph synthesis, on the one hand easy to modify, convenient for business flexibility adjustment; On the one hand, reading is friendly and conducive to the participation of designers.

  • Combination service: focus on automatic adaptation according to the main width and height, which directly determines the final output of the picture effect. (The following two comparison pictures optimize the effective display area by automatic adaptation of edge detection for vertical materials)

 





During the Double Eleven, we produced a total of millions of picture materials, which perfectly solved the Mission Impossible of millions of ammunition!

  • Through the material collection platform, we empower merchants, who can make pictures suitable for wireless conference at a low cost and obtain more exposure traffic.

  • By using the graphic DSL language, we empower designers to mass-produce the visuals to the same standard and increase productivity.

  • Through the whole combination system, we empower personalization and make the Arsenal of personalization full.

Future and Outlook

Shored up the ball in the carnival, we use the ready-made venue framework supporting the taobao double 12 activities and ali Spring Festival, the whole framework has stabilized the venue, the future will automate page set up by means of system configuration, we hope we can have a complete end on the framework, the venue in the cloud data output and various rules of configuration can be automated, Systematization, better meet the needs of the normal scene promotion.

In addition, in addition to continuing to be applied to promote the construction of personalized venue, we plan to transfer this ability to more personalized scenes, such as the daily personalized thousands of people on mobile Taobao and Mobile Tmall. On the premise of further improving and expanding the basis of unified DSL, it can horizontally provide the corresponding scene support for business parties within the group. Truly enabling businesses, enabling small two, fully mining flow value.

About Alibaichuan

Baichuan.taobao.com is alibaba Group “cloud” + “end” core strategy is Alibaba Group wireless open platform, based on world-class back-end services and mature business components, through the opening of “technology, business and big data”, Provide mobile entrepreneurs with solutions that can quickly build apps, commercialize apps and improve user experience; At the same time, it provides diversified entrepreneurial services – physical space, incubation operation, venture investment, etc., providing comprehensive guarantee for mobile entrepreneurs.