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How can we improve our bidding system for advisors to promote their listings? 

UX RESEARCH • Responsive web

A discovery project auditing a legacy ad campaign system and exploring industry-standard models which resulted in strategic recommendations and identifying monetization opportunities.

Overview

My Role: Senior Product Designer

Team: 1 Designer, 2 Product Managers and Advisor Community Manager

Duration: 6 weeks

Tools: Figma, FigJam, SurveyMonkey, Dscout, Dovetail

Platform: Responsive web

  • I led user research interviews and launched surveys to gather insights on the Featured Listing experience.

  • I conducted a competitive analysis and compiled industry best practices for stakeholder reviews.

  • Using this research exploration, I provided a strategic roadmap for an MVP and expanding monetization opportunities.

My Role and Contributions

Objective

The platform had recently opened its doors to allow new advisors to create listings which prompted business leaders to explore monetization opportunities. They wanted to explore various ad campaign systems to help evaluate the current Featured Listings experience, a bidding system that allows listings to gain the top placement on a category page. Insights from the research would guide the possibilities for potential improvements.

Goals

UX Goals
Discover user pain points in the current bidding system. Evaluate ad campaign features of seller-services products and gather industry best practices for ad placements.

Business Goals
Review the internal ad campaign system and compare with industry examples. Assess resources and use research insights to determine updates or an overhaul of the current feature.

Research

Current State Challenges

As I reviewed the experience to create a Featured Listing bid, I presented these main issues:

  • The pages used an outdated ASPX codebase and lacked responsive design, which restricted the ability for future expansion, efficiency and scalability.

  • The results overview page and subsequent pages in tabs lacked modern UI patterns and overall clarity in content.

  • From the customer’s perspective, Featured Listings was not visible by default on the category page. To see them, customers had to specifically filter and sort by “Featured Advisors”. This meant that advisors were not getting the optimal placement and viewership they paid for.

Methodology

USER INTERVIEWS

  • 8 low-med value advisors ($5K-99,999 revenue in 2024)

  • 3 high-value advisors ($100K+ revenue in 2024)

Duration: 10 days

Tools: FigJam, Dscout, Dovetail

USER SURVEYS

  • 94 responses from low-med value advisors

  • 67 responses from high-value advisors

  • 105 responses from customers

Duration: 10 days

Tools: SurveyMonkey, Dovetail

User Research Findings

  • Over 62% of advisors were unsure of their return on investment on their Featured Listing bids.

  • 81% of the advisors interviewed and over 36% of those surveyed use social media as another way to advertise their services.

  • Advisors wanted creative tools/features to market themselves. Some use third-party tools like Canva to create images and video to share on social media and personal websites.

  • Advisors cared most about Return on Ad Spend (ROAS). The number of clicks on their listing was their second most desired metric.

  • Almost 38% of customers did not have a clear definition of what “Featured Listing” was, they thought it was the platform who promoted these advisors based on high quality. The word “Sponsored” made the most sense to them, an ad paid by the advisor to promote their listing.

“The amount I spend on bids is way too much at times, I want to know what I can do to improve my listing. I want to know who clicked on me so I can reach out to them.”
— High-value advisor

Desk Research: 5 Best Practices for Ad Placements

After completing user research, I carefully considered the customer perspective and where they would interact with these sponsored listings. I dove into several UX research articles from the Baymard Institute, identified the appropriate guidelines related to ads and synthesized them. I then shared this analysis with my PMs and stakeholders to help create a strategy for an optimal ad experience for customers.

1. Minimize Ads on the Homepage

They can distract users and make a negative first impression, especially on mobile. If ads are necessary, ensure they aren't overly distracting.

2. Avoid or De-Emphasize Ads on the Account Page

Limit ads on the account page to prevent user distraction and frustration. Ads should be subtle and clearly differentiated from core account features.

3. Avoid Placing Ads Directly Above or Within Product Lists or Search Results

Any ads should be subtle and should not push other items out of view. "Featured Products" should be relevant to the user's current search or list.

4. Reduce Ads in the Checkout Process

To avoid cart abandonment, minimize ads in the checkout flow. Prominent ads, particularly large ones on mobile, can distract users from order details. Either eliminate these ads or place them discreetly below the primary content.

Competitive Analysis

In parallel with the best practices research, I also worked on a competitive analysis. The 5 products I analyzed were: Instacart, Fiverr, Etsy, Amazon and Ebay.

I structured my evaluation of their ad campaign systems around the following key questions:

  • Are there variations in ad types shown?

  • Are there variations in ad types offered?

  • Where are the ads displayed?

  • Are educational resources provided to the user?

  • Are there incentives for new users to create ads?

  • Are tools for data insights provided to the user?

Recommendations

My observations and research yielded key insights that would inform an MVP, focusing on strategic lightweight updates to the current experience. I also identified future iterations designed to expand monetization opportunities.

These four key areas would create a more holistic ad campaign system that would increase engagement and revenue for both the platform and advisors:

Examples of ad types from Instacart

1. Provide options for ad types and campaigns to address various advisor needs.

Future Considerations

  • Offer campaign types based on advisor objectives

  • Advisors can create their own “brand” pages that display all of their listings and self-authored content (various reading types, articles, blogs, videos, etc.)

  • Consider offering an incentive/credit to new Advisors to help them get started on bids

For MVP

  • Include clear “Sponsored” badges on advisor cards

  • Include Sponsored Advisors carousels

2. Display ads in high-traffic pages (web & app) to maximize visibility.

Example of inbox ad from Fiverr

For MVP

  • Homepage

  • Category pages

  • Search results

  • Authenticated homepage

Future Considerations

  • Mail inbox

  • Marketing landing pages, partner and affiliate sites

  • Page collisions, pages where chosen advisor becomes unavailable

  • Leave feedback flow if customer rated the advisor 3 stars or below

Example of ads resources hub from Instacart

3. Empower advisors with educational resources so they can learn growth strategies for their business.

For MVP

  • Walk-through tutorial and how-to-guides

  • FAQs

  • Detailed help pages

Future Considerations

  • Dedicated Sponsored Listings hub with detailed resources including:

    • Webinars

    • Short video lessons

    • Success stories

Example of ads resources hub from Instacart

4. Share data insights and performance metrics to help advisors make informed decisions.

For MVP

  • Provide clear definitions of terminology and baselines of success/failure

  • Give suggestions and guidance on how listings can be improved

Future Considerations

  • Display detailed metrics with data visualizations that illustrate performance trends over time

  • Include actionable feedback based on performance thresholds

Process

Before starting the UI exploration, I worked with our PM and tech lead to map out the main user flows for an ad campaign:

  • Entry point from the dashboard

  • Creating a campaign

  • Managing a campaign (ending, scheduling, reinstating an ended campaign)

  • Viewing campaign results

  • Adding funds if account balance was insufficient

Initial UI Exploration

Through user research, we know that most advisors use their desktop when performing business activities, (these explorations were created for desktop) but I wanted to also make sure that these initial design explorations were responsive. The current experience as mentioned earlier, did not use responsive design for all of its pages.

I anchored my approach on these key factors:

  • Use more modern UI design patterns for completing a form

    • Reduce cognitive load, simplify the multi-step form in a singular column, clear labels and CTAs

    • Mobile-friendly design, keep the user in control with progressive steps to navigate/edit and provide clear system feedback

  • Prepare for future feature parity and increase usage in the advisor app

    • Advocate for systems thinking and using our design components for web and app (Flutter) for ease of development, efficiency and scalability

Outcome

During the design exploration phase, the leadership team and stakeholders continued their parallel discussions, weighing the options of continuing the legacy Featured Listings or creating a brand new advertising model.

In reviews with this team, my PMs shared various examples of advertising models (auction-based systems, pricing models, page targeting, etc.) while I advocated for best UX practices and presented recommendations based on industry research.

Eventually, the VP of Product decided that the cost of establishing a brand new advertising model was too high. The decision was based on a lack of time and development resources to support both the advisor and customer experience. Ultimately, the team decided to prioritize customer growth since this brought most of the revenue to the platform.

Halting the project was a bit disappointing, but it was the right choice. We avoided wasting energy and resources that would have been used had the project been canceled during a more critical time like the development phase. I’m glad that I advocated for more user-friendly tools for our advisors and I’m proud of the valuable research I contributed. It serves as a strong foundation to support design decisions for a robust and modern bidding system when the timing and resources are right.

If our team had the opportunity to move forward, the next steps would be to:

  • Continue the design exploration phase with a couple more variations

  • Conduct a lightweight usability test with advisors using our 2 best designs to discover areas of improvement and validate our design direction

  • Using insights from our usability test, refine the best design approach, review with the team before final dev hand off

  • Once the feature is released, monitor the following KPIs:

    • Click-through rate on the Sponsored Listings (ads)

    • Conversion rate of Sponsored Listings

    • Revenue from Sponsored Listings

    • Advisor satisfaction rate (NPS)