New Ad Campaign Creation Flow

Taking an old flow and designing a new ad campaign creation process for Agency users. This includes adding new layouts, features and visual treatments in order to meet the needs of our new customer base.

Role: UX Designer

Timeline: 2+ years (2022-2024)

Team: Internal & External Developers, Project Managers, Technical Writers, Marketing, Sales, QA Testers

Background: The Platform

Disney Campaign Manager (previously known as Hulu Ad Manager) was launched in March 2020 as a platform for advertisers to create and manage their own ad campaigns on Hulu. Campaign creation (see video) involved the following:

  • Setting up a campaign's name, the dates it will run and its budget

  • Targeting viewers by choosing a variety of demographic options such as age, geolocation, interests, hobbies, types of content they watch and more

  • Uploading a creative (video ad)

  • Submitting your campaign for approval

Problem Statement: Make it work for Agencies

When we launched the platform, the main customer was a SMB (Small/Medium Business) advertisers. However agencies users became the new target user. The team's stakeholders and I understood that we were going to need to make a new campaign flow because:

  • Agencies are more sophisticated users than SMBs and want more options in the platform such as more ad formats and more targeting options

  • Agencies bring in more revenue than SMBs, and their requests would make us more inline with competitors

  • We were going to rebuild the whole platform to be in-house (currently managed by a 3rd party agency since launch), giving me the opportunity to redo the UX

Why do we want agency users?

  • Agencies bring in more revenue than SMBs

  • Business goals changing to better suit the needs of agency users

  • Achieving more parity with the options offered to advertisers in the direct (as in not self-serve) side of the company

  • Become more inline with competitors

Requirements: What Agencies Expect

Agency users have different needs than SMBs, and we needed to add new features to meet those needs Below is a list of user needs I has to consider with a brief description of each.

  • Agency users want more options for targeting to let them better reach their clients' customer base. Such as:

    • Dayparting: The ability to choose the schedule of days and times when the ad should run and should not run

    • Frequency: How often an ad should air

  • A line item is a single set of targeting, budget, dates, creative assets, etc.

    In the current platform: 1 campaign = 1 line item

    In the new flow: 1 campaign = multiple line items

    Having many line items is useful for agency users since they tend to run multiple sets of targeting/creatives under the same client/brand

  • A VAST (video ad serving template) tag is a string of code that is configured in a 3rd party application that includes:

    • Video ads with different content and/or different audio/video quality

    • Tracking pixels or 3rd party tags to count number of views (or impressions)

    VAST was already offered in the direct (not self-serve) side of the business and it was a common ask I noticed during market research sessions.

Prior Work

A previous designer had done exploration on a new campaign design where the whole flow would be on a single page (shown here). They also did user testing on how this design performed against the page-by-page layout that existed.

Of the 6 Advertisers who tested both designs:

  • Half the users preferred the single-page flow

  • Users felt there weren't clear distinctions between the steps in single-page flow

  • They found the "progress bar" in the page-by-page flow useful because it told them what step they were on

  • Liked that they could see all the steps at once in the single-page flow's navigation bar

Discovery: Single-Page Layout

Due the previous designs and research, I came to the conclusion that it would be simpler for me to go forward with the single-page layout.

Even though user testing showed that users were split on the single-page vs. page-by-page designs, I made the hypothesis that the single-page would be better because

  • It would be easier to navigate with the new features coming in

  • It would be more scaleable for future iterations

Below are a few examples of competitor self-serve ad platforms I looked at. I focused on the overall user flows and how they handled multiple “line items”

Meta: Calls line items "Ad Sets"; targeting is on one page and creative setup in following page

Meta: Calls line items "Ad Sets"; targeting is on one page and creative setup in following page

Snap: Calls line items "Ad Sets"; targeting is on one page and creative setup in following page

Snap: Calls line items "Ad Sets"; targeting is on one page and creative setup in following page

TikTok: Calls line items "Ad Groups"; targeting is on one page and creative setup in following page

TikTok: Calls line items "Ad Groups"; targeting is on one page and creative setup in following page

Designs: Early Concepts

A major change in the new campaign flow was the implementation of line items. A line item is a single set of targeting, budget, dates, creative assets, etc. Below is my exploration of how I could display multiple line items in a single page.