Pinkoi Advertising System Bootstrap
My Role
Product Designer
Research, Interaction, Information Architecture, Prototyping, Testing
Team
1 PM, 1 Product Designer,
4 Developers, 1 Data scientist
Duration
Aug 2018 - Sep 2019
Background
The advertising system project aims to provide insightful, easy-to-use, and useful tools for designers on Pinkoi, to help them advertise their listing items to grow their business with a lower threshold.
We expect that The AD system can also increase income and the orders converted from AD, and the search system can be improved efficiently through the data/insight we learned from the AD system.
Challenge
By research, the designers on Pinkoi had no advertising experience in general and were not familiar with the concept and process of advertising. Therefore, making the AD system simple and easy to understand for inexperienced designers to use and letting them profit via this system would be a significant challenge.
On the other hand, Pinkoi had never introduced advertising listing items before, and this would be the first time our customers would see the advertising listing items. So how to balance the ratio between advertising listing items and normal listing items displayed would be another challenge.
Lo-fi wireframe discussion
Lo-fi wireframe proposal discussion
Wireframe & Flow
Mockup & flow
Progress
Research
We did the competitive product analysis to acquire more domain knowledge of advertising first. By researching Facebook, Google, Etsy, Shopee..etc., we sorted out different advertising systems and focused on the system that fit us the most: CPC & GSP bidding system.
Then we interview several designers on Pinkoi who had advertising experience on other EC marketplaces to know which part of the advertising process is most difficult. By the end of the interview, we found that the most challenging part for designers is setting the bidding price; they didn't know what price they should bid.
Design
At the beginning of this stage, I used many whiteboard drawings to address my concept and discussed it with project members for fast design iteration. From flow to wireframe to hi-fi mockup, the interaction and the information display of the AD system become more apparent. By the end of this stage, I collaborated with developers to build the pilot test production prototype.
Pilot Test
Through the pilot test, we tested the stability and accuracy of the AD system. We also collect users’ behavior and conduct surveys and interviews to get more insight and ideas for iteration in the pilot test. After 2 phases of the pilot test and several revisions, we finally launched the AD system for all designers to use.
Final Design
Solution
Simple advertising listing items activating procedure
Designers can activate advertising listing items in 3 steps, including setting bidding price, advertising region, and daily budget.
Comparing the natural performance and advertising performance
Each advertising listing item performance row shows both natural and advertising data. It's easy for designers to evaluate advertising performance.
Non-disturbing advertising products display.
Advertising listing items is almost the same as the general products with only an "AD" tag.
The ratio of items displayed on desktop devices is 4 advertising listing items to 12 normal listing items. On mobile devices, it is 2 AD listing items to 6 normal listing items.
Outcome/ Result
The AD system made a positive impact successfully after launched. By the end of the quarter we launched, we discovered results as below
📈 15% Designer adoption rate and 80% retention rate.
📈 Increase income three times of estimation.
Because of the AD system bootstrapping's success, the AD system became a product line of Pinkoi, which has a dedicated squad to maintain and iterate for.