Adtech
Enabling publishers to personalise the online experience for their customers
Provided increased CPMs for Publishers and made high quality ad inventory visible, and actionable, for Advertisers.
Role
Head of UX
Company
Magnite / Carbon
The challenge
Millions of people browse the web each day, all the while publishers and advertisers are looking for ways to personalise experiences for each potential customer. Carbon helps them do just that.
The challenge was to ensure the product provided publishers all of this information in a digestible format, with clear details of audience segments that are easy to activate and serve.
The process
Discovery workshops
To ensure the team are always headed in the right direction, I introduced a series of discovery workshops with our most engaged clients.
The purpose of these sessions was to uncover the reasons behind the issues people faced, concluding with prioritisation activities to identify which problems we should aim to solve to add value to the product.
User interviews
One to one discussions with the most active users was a regular activity during the design process, drawing on the experiences, industry knowledge, and attitudes towards the existing tooling in the advertising space.
Through these sessions, we were able to build up a group of engaged individuals who we could test product updates with, gaining accurate insights in a short space of time.
Giving actionable insights
Customers needed to quickly understand the intent and demographic make up of their website visitors. The goal of Carbon Insights was to provide high level, actionable data at a glance, with the ability to dig deeper into more granular data points where needed.
Purchasing trends and brand affinity are promoted throughout the main dashboard, as these have proven to be major factors in the campaigns ran by our customers.
The solution
Scalable audience creation
One of the biggest challenges for our product team has been to develop an audience creation tool that gives users enough control to align with their specific campaign needs, whilst keeping the interface as intuitive as possible.
The landscape varied in the patterns used for controlling conditional logic. Some of our competitors even required users to input raw SQL queries to build a segment. We wanted to avoid this approach entirely as we’d identified that even the most tech savvy among our user base responded positively to having filtering options presented to them through recognisable UI patterns.
Visually grouping clusters of filters helped people make sense of the logic as their segment queries grew in complexity, whilst autocomplete typeahead input fields removed any usability issues with dropdown boxes.
We had observed that it was crucial for users to have an idea of the segment size ahead of creation, being a critical factor when building campaigns. Our solution was to introduce an audience reach estimator that updated in real-time as the user added and customised filters. This addition, coupled with our ‘2 click’ activation model, helped eliminate countless hours of unnecessary tasks with their previous toolset.
Outcomes
Exponential growth of daily active users in the platform
Increased CPMs, CTR across customer websites
A boost in ROI for customers activating their audience segments
