Reddit makes most of its money from advertising. Because of this, Reddit has a tool that allows for advertisers to create advertisement posts. This is very similar to how Facebook, Snapchat, LinkedIn, Instagram, Twitch and many otter sites make money. The problem with our ads platform is that it did not support many important features that many of our competitors supported.
At the end of December 2019, I was moved to the ads team as their lead designer. At that point our Q! roadmap was looking a little slow. I took it under my responsibility to address some of the easiest developmental changes to make to our ads platform that would have the highest impact.
I went to our ads teams which were primarily located in Chicago and New York and spoke with them about our ads platform. I spoke with dozens of ad representatives within Reddit and to a handful from some of our most profitable clients.
After conducting dozens of user interviews I planned a roadmap and got each project approved. These projects were relatively simple UI changes that helped introduce some of the most successful and impactful new features of the year. Advertisers and ads managers were ecstatic to see they got the changes they asked for within months. Below are some of the highlights.
Making large scale changes to multiple advertising campaign was nearly impossible. Most large scale advertisers used third party software for this. Now these changes are easy to make. Simple changes can now be made to hundreds of ads at once with bulk editing tools.
What is it? Well that’s complicated. A Lookalike Audience is a way to reach new people who are likely to be interested in your business because they're similar to your best existing customers. They look like your already existing customer base and are very potentially new customers. My role was to incorporate this into our current roadmap as we already had the capability to have this functionality.
User interviews showed me something very apparent. Advertising managers needed a way to save specific queries within the ads platform. These queries generate tables and data however there is no way to save these queries. Users were bookmarking the web. I felt that building a way to manage this data was important.
Every week, executives need to present the successes and failures of their advertising campaigns through. One simple way to download all the data is to a CSV or Excel document. I created and designed a system so executives could receive an email each week, day or month displaying the data regarding their ads.
I began to design a completely new design language for our ads platform. These new design components transformed out old platform into a new modern feel that could also be used to make edits on mobile. While these new designs were much cleaner, I left Reddit before they could be implemented. Below are some of the designs from this entirely new design system. As of now, these have still not been implemented and the old designs are still what you see on the live site.
