I managed the rebuild of Gartner Digital Markets’ pay-per-click ad auction platform which generates $100M’s in annual revenue. The improved UX led to 15%+ revenue growth year over year.

Problem statement:

The legacy ad platform UX required all auction bids to be a percentage of a default bid. This system could not set bid prices based on specific cost per click, cost per lead, or other related goals. This meant marketing and sales teams couldn’t accurately predict these ad spend metrics and inbound lead volume.

As part of this project, I built my business unit’s UX Research program to collect qualitative feedback. This previously was contracted to external consultants. By building these capabilities within Gartner I was able to significantly cut external consulting costs, build out related longitudinal research, and help the product owners more quickly refine their post-MVP launch roadmaps. 

Based on prototype testing I recommended descoping several project requirements that had high engineering costs and were determined to have limited impact on end users. Additionally, one risk we identified early in the design and were about to address in testing was the likely increased time on task that more granular controls would require. Users confirmed that while more granular bid inputs would increase their time to complete bid adjustments it was a desired trade-off for most high-spend users given the value they gained by defining specific max costs per click or costs per lead.

Outcomes:

Post-launch we saw a 1.4 point increase (out of 10) in user satisfaction with the ad platform. Ad revenue increased 15-25% each quarter and continued well into the pandemic despite those challenging external circumstances. The success of the updated user flows also allowed us to move up the launch of several related mission critical priorities around personalized auction and budget-based recommendations.