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.
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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
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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
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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”
Designs: Early Concepts
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”