0 to 1 Self Serve Advertising Platform
Overview
In 2021, as Kevel continued to scale its product portfolio and broaden its customer base, we embarked on in-depth research across both small businesses and enterprise-level clients. This thorough investigation uncovered a powerful opportunity: the development of self-serve portals for our publisher customers, empowering advertisers to effortlessly create and manage their own campaigns.
Role
I was responsible for conducting user
research, designing mock ups
and usability testing.
Timeline
Spring - Winter 2021
User Profiles
Publishers
These are Kevel customers. These users serve and manage ads on their own digital properties.
Advertisers
Users who pay for their product, service, etc. to be advertised on a publisher’s property.
Publishers need a way for their advertisers to create and manage their own campaigns, alleviating stress and giving resources back across various teams.
Ideation
Using previous customer research to identify the MVP, along with competitive research, we sketched the beginnings of a self serve platform. Because this is a brand new product, we began with one use case, arguably the most revenue generating: promoting products in the retail/ecommerce space.
Login Page
Advertiser logs in through a branded portal
Targeting
Two different experiences for how an advertiser could target audiences
Dashboard
Advertiser sees a view of how their campaigns are performing
Spend Strategy
Advertiser fills out how they’d like their spend to be used for the campaign
Campaign Creation
Advertiser starts to fill out fields for their product
promotion ad campaign
Ad preview
This is how we’ve imagined a promoted product to look
Mock ups
Moving into the design phase, I focused on how the campaign creation experience would work and
explored different solutions. Thinking about the campaign creation process, I broke the steps into expandable containers for easy inputting and referencing, if the advertiser needed to go back to fix or add to a field.
Internal Testing
Before bringing our concept to customers, I wanted to validate the functionality, terminology, look and feel with Subject Matter Experts at Kevel. I spoke with several Solutions Architects and performed usability testing to get feedback on the first round of mock ups.
Early insights revealed the following:
Dashboard
Campaign Creation
Users were looking for data points like CTR and conversion
Users wanted a visual way to see how their campaigns were performing
Users expected to see return on ad spend (ROAS) as a ratio instead of a percentage
Users expectations were met in terms of having each step on the same screen
Users preferred the target search terms experience, because they could
define what those terms were, rather than choosing from a pre-selected listUsers expected to see different terminology for certain data points, one example: using the term ‘spend’ instead of revenue
Remote User Testing: UsabilityHub
After doing another iteration of design work from internal feedback, I took this version to remote testing. The goal of this round of testing was to understand if the campaign creation experience was intuitive to the everyday user, and understand where there could be confusion in the campaign building experience. This was another way for us to understand how users felt about the experience, but more from a visual perspective.
Results
68% ranked the usability of the experience as a 4 or 5 out of 5
62% ranked campaign creation as “easy”
How would you describe the campaign creation experience?
“very user friendly”
“streamlined”
“loved the review at the end”
“very logical flow”
“engaging and interesting”
Takeaways
Although the design was validated through a majority of the feedback received, some great suggestions around how the information could be presented were made that led to another quick iteration of changes.
Users were confused by terms like Cost Per Click (CPC), and suggested adding information tooltips
Users wanted some instructions for steps like Budget and Target Search Terms
