Facebook-Zulily Joint Hack Day

Zulily launches over 9,000 unique styles — more than the size of an average Costco — every day. This causes unique time and scale challenges for the Marketing team as they rapidly create, place and manage ads. Facebook and Zulily’s Business and Technology teams have been working together to build a platform — the Acquisition Marketing Platform (AMP) — to automate the ad management process on Facebook.

During this partnership, we realized that both companies share a passion for enabling the engineering teams to move fast and put new, exciting features in the hands of customers. In that spirit, we hosted a joint hack day to see how we can further advance the AMP tool-set.

Joint FB-ZU Hack day participants: David Whitney (FB), Leo Hu (ZU) and Tim Moon (ZU). Not in picture: Omar Zayat (FB), Justin Sadoski (FB), Mason Bryant (ZU) and Rahul Srivastava (ZU)

The key wins for the hack day:

• End-to-end automation: Currently, Marketing uses AMP to create the ad assets and Facebook’s PowerEditor to target and place the ads. The joint team built a prototype, utilizing the FB Graph and Ads APIs, to automate the ad process entirely within AMP. This is a huge win for the team! Marketing no longer has to switch between tools and now has a central place to manage all FB ads. This feature will further enable Marketing to scale up their ad creation process. The AMP Engineering team is now working on building a production version of the prototype.
• Ad objects hierarchy management: FB ads have a hierarchy of campaign, ad-set and ad. The joint team spent time diving deep into the API to manage this hierarchy. Building this understanding is critical to automating management of campaigns, ad sets and reporting on key metrics.
• API-driven ad Targeting: There are many ways to define the target of an ad on FB: interest, website customer audience, custom audience, etc. The team used the Targeting API to dynamically change the target range of an ad. This enables Zulily to build some really interesting scenarios that can leverage real-time data in its systems; as we track the cost and conversion of every ad that is launched, we can now automate the increase or decrease the targeting reach via the API calls.
• Account management: In October, FB released a new model to manage business ad accounts. The team spent time revamping the existing account model. This was a huge help and removed numerous access- and account-related roadblocks to further development. It would have taken us days of back-and-forth over email and conference calls to adopt the new model. During the hack day, this was completed in hours!

We had a fun and highly productive day-and-a-half of hacking. It was amazing to see the cool ideas and products that materialized from this event. The AMP team is super excited (and the Marketing team even more so!) to build all the features that are now on their backlog. We are looking forward to future FB-ZU hack days!

Originally published at https://zulily-tech.com on December 16, 2014.