Google Ads Blog - by Jiageng Mao
Google Ads (https://ads.google.com/) is an online advertising platform developed by Google, where advertisers pay to display brief advertisements, service offerings, product listings, video content, and generate mobile application installs within the Google ad network to web users. Google Ads has evolved into Google's main source of revenue and offers services under a pay-per-click pricing model. We went to visit Google Ads in the afternoon of the second day of our trip and listened to our speaker’s sharing on his working experience.
Our speaker, Dr. Felix Wong is a senior software engineer in Google Ads. He graduated from CUHK and received his master degree in Canada. Then he came to the US for his Ph.D. degree in Princeton. Now he is a senior software engineer in Google and works on applying machine learning techniques on the advertisement service.
At the beginning, Felix shared with us some basic concept on the advertisement, including pay-per-click (PPC) pricing model, Cost per acquisition (CPA) and cost per conversion (CPC). He elaborated the mechanism of displaying advertisements, pricing, and cost.
Then Felix shared with us how machine learning techniques are applied into advertisement service. They first collect data, analyze them and transform them into machine learning signals. Then they build machine learning models and feed signals into the model to obtain outputs. As an engineer, their current work is analyzing detailed needs, extracting signals and designing machine learning models.
After that, Felix shared with us how his past research experience is fitting into his current work and how to join Google as an engineer. During his undergraduate study, his research focused on optimization and formulated real-world problems as optimization problems and found a way to solve them efficiently. In his current work, he also needs to build optimization problems and set constraints to satisfy production needs. So his research work fits with his job needs and he was able to join Google Ads. He also talked about some tricks to pass the interview on Google, like practicing LeetCode and so on. He said that coding ability is of extreme significance in his current job.
At the Q&A section, Felix shared with us his view on the management structure and also the working environment in Google. He said his working hours are flexible and depend on whether he has finished his work, instead of fixed hours. He also talked about his opinion on the Chinese market, work-life balance and so on.
Finally, Felix showed us around the Google campus. Google campus includes more than ten buildings and occupies a large space. It took us more than one hour to work through the whole campus. We also spend a little time in the souvenir shop.