Expanding Advertiser Reach for Greater Market Share

A large technology client asked us:

What are the needs, experiences, and motivations of businesses who advertise on our platform? How can we improve our user journey to better meet their needs and increase market share?

A large technology client approached us for help better understanding the foundational needs of their business customers who utilize digital advertising. They wanted to build a set of user personas to understand the nuances of their potential customers and explore ideal user journeys to drive their product decisions. They were also looking to evaluate the ease of use and helpfulness of their current site content during both the onboarding and ad creation experiences to enhance the user journey. 

We answered:

AnswerLab designed a mixed-methods, two-phased approach for this research, starting with qualitative in-depth interviews and culminating in a more extensive quantitative survey with over 700 users to validate the findings with data. In both phases, we spoke with digital advertisers in four diverse target global markets who were interested in advertising on our client’s platform but didn’t currently have an account.

Our Research Operations team drilled down into the details to ensure we recruited a wide range of participants to ensure a representative sample of potential customers. This approach included getting a mix of:

• Verticals and industries
• Company sizes
• Total ad spend budget
• Mobile and desktop users
• And more

To develop clear personas, we had to understand participants’ business needs and goals, their ad creation and spending habits, metrics they value, their larger advertising goals, what they were looking for in a new ad platform, and more. While the in-depth interviews let us dive deep into these details and understand the holistic picture, the quantitative survey gave us hard data on these metrics to get a larger view.

Additionally, we had participants walk through the end-to-end onboarding journey to evaluate usability and ease of use and understand preferences regarding the ad creation processes. 

Outcome:

Our advertising experience experts delivered a visually engaging, insightful report that provided a deep understanding of digital advertiser mental models. We unearthed surprising insights about each group, empowering our client to prioritize the most promising avenues for reaching new audiences and make impactful product decisions. 

Our findings and deliverables included:

• Five distinct user personas built from metrics and insights on users’ depth of ad expertise, preferred ad formats, the level of complexity, and what they were looking for in an ad platform experience, among other data points
• High-level and in-depth comparisons across the personas visualized for easy comprehension and empathy-building
• Our team’s recommendations on which persona to prioritize first, based on the potential opportunity for our client
• Both big-picture and highly tactical recommendations to meet each persona’s needs
• Data visualizations and graphs with detailed analyses and complementary qualitative insights for each persona

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Want to learn more about the digital advertising landscape and how UX fits in? Check out our article, Decoding the World of Ads: Getting Started with UX Research on Advertising Experiences.