Advertiser Campaign Manager
Client
Digital Turbine
Role
Product Designer
Year
2024
The Problem
Unified Campaign Manager is an ad management system that helps advertisers manage their digital and in-app campaigns across various websites and mobile. It also gives advertisers the capability to target, track and create reporting on their own ad campaigns.
There was a direct ask from the CTO to consolidate the 5 separate platforms that comprised our various ad campaign offerings (web traffic, user acquisition, app downloads, etc.) and make it easier for our internal campaign managers to create campaigns for our clients. This presented many challenges for the design team:
Each platform was built on a different framework and there was no unified design language.
Internal ad campaign managers would have to work between multiple complex platforms in order to spend ad dollars for clients.
It took 128 steps and $10,000 to onboard one new client and run their ad campaign.
Research
My first priority was to schedule walkthroughs with each product lead, asking them to take me through the existing campaign creation flow in their respective systems. Then I could start to identify pain points and collect feedback on their vision for the platform.
Next, I created a card-sorting test. This exercise was meant to track the relationship between the user goal and all the platforms in which this goal could be achieved. I asked each product lead and engineer to complete the form, expecting to find more cohesion amongst the different teams and campaign types. Instead, we found no two team members had the same answers.
Following my research, I completed an audit of common field sections between platforms to explore how to consolidate and reduce redundancy.
Implementation
From a business perspective, unifying these platforms would allow our sales teams to sell brand advertisers one unified product, regardless of the type of ad campaign they were hoping to run.
Our first pass was to take the Occam's Razor approach. We created a prototype showing what it would look like if we took every field of every platform and stuck it all in one place. While this solution fulfilled the company’s brief and checked the boxes of the original ask, ultimately the user experience was too cluttered and repetitive.
As an alternative solution which would take more dev time but would result in a better user experience, we decided to create a wizard tool in which users would select their campaign goals, upload creatives, and be served only the fields that aligned with their campaign objectives.
Accomplishments
We significantly reduced the steps needed to launch a campaign. We worked with the engineering team to unify the backend and the dev team, who helped build Salesforce integrations which pre-populated many of the fields
A 4 year long effort to unify our demand platforms was finally completed.
Our product leaders were dedicated to ensuring the implementation of the new flow did not disrupt the current workflow for our teammates and the company.
Because we were able to lower our cost to launch, it opened new opportunities for our sales team to pitch our product to smaller companies with lower ad spend.