Redesigning the Ad Studio signup experience
PRODUCT MANAGEMENT · WEB · MOBILE
OVERVIEW
The old signup experience for Spotify's self-serve advertising platform Ad Studio was rather clunky and seemed to add a lot of friction for new users. Our user research told us that most users were eager to dive into the platform to explore its capabilities. As a result, we had significant attrition that had a rippling effect on the entire growth funnel.
How might we optimize the signup experience to increase new user acquisition, ad account creation and possible, activation (booked campaigns)?
We optimized the signup experience by modularizing the signup form and reducing UI friction, while making sure that our qualified, completed sales lead volume did not decrease. With learnings from a well crafted A/B test, our changes eventually opened up the top of our growth funnel and made it quicker for users to get into the platform.
MY ROLE
I was the product lead.
THE TEAM
1 designer
4+ engineers
1 user researcher
2 data scientists
Salesforce product manager (consulted)
Sales & Marketing leadership (consulted)
TOOLS USED
Google suite, LucidChart, Bigquery
THE TIMELINE
June 2022 - Jan 2023
A JOURNEY THROUGH THE REDESIGNED EXPERIENCE
Ad account creation rate eventually increased by 49% on desktop
Let's walk through the redesigned experience. Firstly, a new user gets started by going to adstudio.spotify.com and clicking 'Start now'
They then connect their Spotify account to authenticate themselves
Next, the user is presented with a signup form which effectively creates an Ad Studio 'user account'
We radically shortened the signup form, increasing the form completion rate from 60% to 94%
An important design principle we employed was modularity. We modularized the signup form to separate user account creation from ad account creation.
The old form involved creating a user account and an ad account. We separated the two so that signup created a completed user account while still creating dummy ad accounts in our database. The dummy ad accounts are completed by the user downstream in their user journey.
We designed a 'choose your own adventure' modal, with two options based on hypotheses of what new users were most eager to do.
We added a 'finish your account setup' prompt in the top-right corner to encourage ad account completion
If the user entered the campaign creation flow, they would be intercepted with the form to complete their ad account
IMPACT
We initially rolled out to 50% of users in an A/B test which gave us the following results
Form completion rate increased from 60% to 94%
Activation rate increased by 19.1pp (percentage points)
Our A/B test also revealed some red flags
Hiccups with the Choose Your Adventure modal
50% of users clicked on 'Create campaign'
Only 7% clicked on 'Add team'
The rest navigated away to explore other parts of the platform, like ad account settings
This told us that our customers - mostly smaller advertisers like artists and SMBs - were eager to dive in to discover the platform and the campaign creation features, rather than to onboard a team.
This led us to reconsider the second option in the modal, re-evaluate the walls of text in the modal and prioritize a user onboarding initiative.
Less completed leads for Sales & Marketing?
% of completed sales leads went down, which may have hurt the sales pipeline. This was concerning since Sales shepherded 85% of Ad Studio revenue through the activation funnel.
I led an investigation into this, diagramming the lead flow from signup, through Salesforce and into the lead routing process. Turns out, the volume of completed leads actually went up. Regardless, we also integrated a third party service Dun & Bradstreet to enrich our sales leads with additional company information based off the business email address (eg. sally@nike.com).
To allow for this, we went back on our decision to pre-populate the email field with the Spotify email address (sally@gmail.com) and instead encourage a business email address with the field name and ghost text.
Decline in marketing opt-in rate
The marketing opt-in rate decreased to 29% with the new signup experience.
To address this, we toggled the checkbox to be opted in (and still editable by the user) by default in countries where there was no legal mandate on this.
After the updates, we rolled out to 100% of users, on desktop & mobile and saw some additional positive results
Ad account creation rate increased by 49% on desktop and 97% on mobile
Time taken to create an ad account decreased from 4 minutes to 2.2 seconds