Limit Volatility.
Pay-Per-Click Bidding 2.0
The Vendor Portal is the one-stop-shop for Gartner Digital Market’s vendors to manage every aspect of their campaigns. Vendors use the portal to create content for their ad listing, bid for placement, collect and manage reviews, and report out on performance.
The Problem.
The Pay-Per-Click bidding system’s core functionality had been in place for over ten years. It was a market that allowed and even inspired what we called “bidding wars”. Some of our users really benefitted from this approach while others fell behind since they didn’t have the resources to constantly monitor the market. This system also caused our markets to change without much rhyme or reason making our reporting and projections not as accurate as they should have been.
The solution.
Throughout this project, we found that users would not pleased with the changes we were going to implement. We were not completely surprised by this since we were going to limit functionality currently provided. This push was coming from our senior leadership team and there was a strong business use case for the changes, so we had to work to identify the potential backlash.
We were able to show senior leadership through research findings that our top users who made up most of our revenue, would have pulled a majority of their spend once these changes were implemented. This enabled us to transition our strategy, invest more time and resources in our new automated bidding system, and update the UX/UI of the current system.
Role and team.
My Roles:
Qualitative Research Lead and Interview Facilitator
Product Management Lead
UX/UI Lead Designer
Product Analytics Lead
Full Team:
Vendors (users)
Vendor Portal Product Directors
Vendor Portal Developers
Client Success & Sales Teams (users + stakeholders)
Product & Design Process.
Research what other Pay-Per-Click markets are doing to avoid market volatility
Understand the business want and need to limit current functionality for users
Gather all user pain points and gains from the current system and create a hierarchy of needs
Report all potential user backlash to senior leadership throughout the entire research process
Lead interviews with our user’s chief decision makers alongside our senior leadership team
Identify all technical inputs needed for more accurate projections and reporting
Help inform the ultimate vision for “Automated Bidding”
Design the UX/UI for the new bidding system based on all feedback