HELPING ADVERTISERS MEASURE their PERFORMANCE ON a top social media app

Header

The biggest draw of Campaign insights was that it allowed the user to view a curated list of metrics that made sense for a particular campaign based on its objective. 

The header gave the user a couple of options to customize this campaign insights page according to their needs.

• The user can set the time period during which the metrics are measured. 

• The Campaign metrics (5) button took the user to an Edit campaign metrics sheet where they could choose five metrics that would appear across all the modules on the page in the order selected. We finalized this list of metrics (a pared-down version of the gigantic list on Ads reporting) based on research.

At first, the campaign metrics was going to be called page metrics. This button was going to live on the top right of the page, next to the edit campaign button (which allowed you to edit the overall campaign, not this page). This was immediately confusing to the users. 

Since the campaign metrics button only affected this campaign insights page, it was important that it lived near the other components that affected this page. So I moved it next to the time period and conversion window.

Next, a fun content design conundrum: To name or not to name? Did the name "page metrics" clearly convey what that button allowed the user to do? Do we have to name everything?

I tested out multiple options with users in research and listened closely to how they referred to it. I also explained the button's function to them in different ways and made a note of what helped them understand quickly. 

Page metrics seemed to confuse the users since no other Pinterest for Business product had page metrics. Finally, I had the following options:

• preferred metrics

• campaign metrics

I decided to go with campaign metrics since these metrics were unique to this campaign's insights page and it made sense in context, especially with the supporting user education (product tour and tooltip). I used the word "preferred" when contextualizing this feature in the help center.

I didn't want the user's understanding of this data to only depend on the colors in the visual. To avoid any accessibility issues and confusion surrounding the percentage increase/decrease and the graph, I made the tooltip for the metrics as descriptive as possible. 

I also had thorough feedback on the state of the metric tiles. The greyed out tiles made it seem like they were unclickable. When a maximum of two tiles are already selected and the user's trying to click another tile, what error/alert is being shown, how and where? Are the checkboxes within the tile visible and clear enough for the user? 

For more detailed notes on tooltips, check out my work on user education.

Ad creatives

Nested within the Content performance module, this section was originally going to be a list of top performing Pins or creative assets. The goal for this module was to pinpoint all the Pins that are performing, their formats and ad groups so the users could make informed decisions that would guide their strategy.

But when we tested it out with the users, it wasn't immediately clear to them what the purpose of this module was or how to use. They needed more guidance and context. Their response to it was: "So? How does this matter to me?"

The users were also not sure what they were supposed to be doing with these insights. The biggest takeaway was that we were focusing too much on the Pin itself and not on the ad groups the creative appears in. 

We began to look at it a bit differently. The Top Pins module was a subsection in Content performance. What kind of content is working well for the user? And how can this guide their strategy?

So with the product designers, I revisited the information architecture of this module and the name. I needed to communicate to the user how x type of content present in x ad group targeted at x audience was performing. We also had a Content format subsection within the Content performance module, so this section needed to work well in combination.

After multiple conversations with both internal and external users, I renamed this section to Ad creatives. I also made the column names clearer and organized the information within the columns in a clearer and more digestible way. This helped the user see exactly what they could gain from this module. 

The product designers and I also worked together to build the hover interactions. Hovering on the creative would show the entire Pin details with the title and description, while hovering on each ad group gave us a snapshot of status, spend and targeting. This further improved user comprehension and helped them draw useful insights.

When you expand the ad group, you can see individual ads there. From within this section, you can be taken to the edit ad page and make changes to the individual ad. 

User education

Since the campaign insights page was a brand new experience and contained a lot of design components not yet introduced across the rest of the Pinterest for Business platform, I had to be thoughtful and strategic when designing the user education. 

• I got the entire product team on board to include a brief and simple product tour with every release since the plan included several new features per release. 

• I gathered all the tooltips on different ads product surfaces (including the ones I wasn't covering) and the help center and ensured that the metric definitions were consistent, simpler and more concise. I then presented the metric and section tooltips to the rest of the content design team to drive alignment across all the product areas and include them in the content standards we were building.

Next steps

I recommended that Ads Reporting be renamed to Campaign Manager, because that aligned with what that page did (and several users referred to it as such). Research showed that users were confused about the purpose of Ads Reporting. The name seemed to make users think that this was where users downloaded their reports, but this page didn't have that functionality at all (reports could be downloaded on the Download Reports page).

In the strategy I laid out, I also proposed that the metric list on Campaign Manager be trimmed down to a succinct one. Eventually, Campaign Manager should serve as the overview of all the campaigns. As such, it was enough to provide just enough metrics to users that they're able to quickly grasp how their campaigns are performing. Campaign Insights, on the other hand, would have the comprehensive list of metrics that users could choose from so they could drill down into individual campaigns. They could customize the page based on each campaign's objective, and select only the relevant metrics that would show up for that campaign every time they opened the page.