Campaign insights

Pinterest's ads measurement has just one page that provided all the insights users needed on all their campaigns: the Ads reporting page. Ads reporting is the equivalent of campaign manager on other platforms. The entire list of campaigns in various stages (active, paused, etc.) is displayed, along with all the relevant metrics. The users have the option of adding any other metrics from a comprehensive list, creating their own custom metrics to display, and filtering. 

However, Ads reporting is not the best surface for slicing and dicing your data if you were an account manager or advertiser. It could be overwhelming to the average user, with its long scroll (not to mention the unforgiving side scroll). If the user wanted to drill down into one campaign, this was the only place they could do it. There was definitely room for improvement in this experience.

Ads reporting interface showing a graph of spend and a table of all the campaigns for that account as rows and metrics as columns

The Ads Reporting interface.

What Pinterest needed was a way to present individual campaign-level data in a digestible format. This space had to be where the user could have carefully curated metrics and insights so they could get a deeper idea of how the campaign was doing. The user should be able to enter this page by clicking on a button near the specific campaign on Ads reporting.

I teamed up with PM, PMM, two UX researchers, and three product designers to strategize, gather user data, perform competitive analysis, and design this new experience. We performed multiple rounds of research with both internal and external users to understand how the Ads Reporting product was falling short and what this new product should look like. We also baked research into every step of the design process.

Based on all the feedback, we brainstormed and zeroed in on the final modules for the MVP.

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.

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:

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.

Campaign insights header.

Edit campaign metrics sheet.


The first module's heading and the graph underneath would change based on the time period the user selects.

The first module is the performance summary with the graph.

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? 

Descriptive tooltip to improve understanding of the metric and graph in performance summary.

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?"

First draft of the Ad creatives module. Just "Ads (number of ads)" did not make it clear to the user what they were looking at. We focused too much on the Pins and not enough on the ad groups.

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. 

Making sure the image got its own column title along with a little more focus on ad groups and ad formats within the ad groups dramatically improved user experience.

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. 

Hovering on the ad creative showed title of the Pin and description.

Hovering on the ad group showed a snapshot of ad group name, status, spend and targeting.

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. 

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.