Reyner Pantou
Monetization / Professional work

Ads inside commerce search

Enabled TikTok advertising on Tokopedia search while preserving organic results and legacy ads.

Role
Search-Side Technical Owner
Delivery
Phased Ad Integrations & Experiments
Tech Stack
Go · RPC
Impact
+21.69% Pseudo Ad GMV

The Problem

The advertising transition had to keep legacy Tokopedia ads discoverable, introduce TikTok ads, and preserve the organic search experience. Latency and independent pagination of organic and ad results were important constraints.

The Architecture

Shopping surfaces call Search API, which uses Search Provider to aggregate TikTok organic and advertising engines. Engine ownership stays outside the API layer.
A simplified view of service responsibilities. Highlighted services are the API layer; engine internals are outside this ownership scope.
01

A controlled transition

Kept old and new ad flows available during experiment-driven migration.

02

Separate result streams

Implemented independent cursors so organic and ad pools could paginate without excluding either stream.

03

Latency-aware design

Reworked the integration path to limit additional request time.

The Execution

Main search-side point of contact for TikTok Ad Manager integration and later Pseudo Ad delivery. I owned design and implementation across the relevant search servers while coordinating with Ads engineering, Product, Frontend, and QA.

What I owned

  • Owned search-side technical design, delivery planning, coordination, and implementation on both search-server sides.
  • Initiated an ecommerce search RPC to allow early ad testing before the broader search API migration.
  • Owned strategies and implementation for Pseudo Ad integration, working with Ads engineering and QA to validate delivery.

Technical impact

  • Integrated the ad manager across Search API and Search Provider, introduced independent organic and advertising cursors, and handled engine impressions and event tracking.
  • The CV reports limiting a projected 506 ms latency increase to 185 ms; the 2024 performance record separately confirms mitigation of the projected regression.
  • Performance records estimate two to three engineering days saved when creating or maintaining the new ad flow.

The Result

Pseudo Ad GMV
+21.69%

Reported experiment, rounded

Pseudo Ad Delivery
+49.09%

Ad-send metric, same experiment

Normal Ad GMV
+6.67%

Separate reported ads result

Business impact

  • The 2025 ads results reported Pseudo Ad GMV growth of 21.692% and ad-send growth of 49.092%. Normal ads reported GMV growth of 6.665% and ad-send growth of 7.897%.
  • Enabled the transition to TikTok Ad Manager while keeping Tokopedia’s existing ads discoverable.

The Takeaway

I owned monetization integration while managing backend compatibility and latency constraints.