Design Ad Click Aggregator
An ad click aggregator is a system that collects, deduplicates, and aggregates billions of ad click events to provide accurate metrics for billing advertisers and powering analytics dashboards.
The core challenge is processing massive volumes of click data in real-time while guaranteeing accuracy. Every click directly translates to money, so the system cannot afford to lose events or count duplicates. Advertisers pay per click, and publishers get paid per click, making data integrity paramount.
Popular Examples: Google Ads reporting, Meta Ads Manager, Amazon Advertising analytics, Twitter/X Ads dashboard
In this chapter, we will explore the high-level design of an ad click aggregator.
This system design problem combines high-throughput data ingestion, stream processing, exactly-once semantics, and time-series aggregation, all critical skills for building modern data systems.
Lets start by clarifying the requirements: