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’s UX required all auction bids to be a percentage of the default bid. This system could not set bid prices based on specific cost per click, cost per lead, or other related goals. Thus, marketing and sales teams could not 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. Previously, this was contracted to external consultants. By building these capabilities within Gartner, I was able to significantly reduce external consulting costs, expand related longitudinal research, and help product owners refine their post-MVP launch roadmaps more quickly.

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 challenging external circumstances. The success of the updated user flows also allowed us to move up the launch of several related mission-critical priorities, such as personalized auction and budget-based recommendations.