iQIYI Data Governance Practices: Event Tracking (Pingback) Governance and Application

On September 26, iQIYI's technical product team held the 19th "iTech Talk" focusing on "Data Governance Exploration and Application," featuring experts from Kuaishou, Meituan, and KuKan.

Researcher Du Yifan presented "iQIYI Pingback Delivery Governance Practice," explaining the definition of Pingback (埋点), its role in capturing user actions such as video start, fast‑forward, and rewind, and the importance of precise timing to avoid counting ads as playback.

The talk identified four key motivations for Pingback governance: overall planning, maintenance, quality assurance, and business value, highlighting issues caused by inconsistent definitions, redundant events, and poor data quality.

To address these, iQIYI established unified Pingback specifications, standardized event definitions, and created a governance workflow that includes a data committee, business data BP groups, and regular tracking of implementation results.

A comprehensive Pingback delivery system was built, consisting of a specification‑driven SDK, a control platform, testing environments, gray‑release monitoring, and a data‑quality platform that validates event delivery, field completeness, and dictionary consistency.

Coordinate management was introduced to map page layouts (pages, blocks, items) to events, enabling precise field binding and supporting scenario‑based testing and quality checks.

The upgrade process involves dual‑running old and new Pingbacks, data verification, warehouse compatibility, and a cloud‑control mechanism for safe deprecation of obsolete events and fields.

Data security considerations were emphasized, ensuring no privacy‑sensitive information is collected and that all downstream data undergoes strict approval and auditing.

After two years of governance, iQIYI reduced total Pingback volume by 40%, halved resource consumption, and shortened integration time from a week to two days, achieving significant efficiency gains.