TikTok Advertisement Manager/TikTok 商业平台

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背景/Background

Leveraging our experience with Ocean Engine (Bytedance's Mainland China Ads platform and Ads Ecosystem), we began migrating our ad platforms to the global market.

As the second highest revenue pillar of Bytedance, TikTok began testing ads in mid-2018. I had the privilege of witnessing and participating in the growth of TikTok's ad business from $5 million to $538 million per month.

 

Over the course of four years, continuous optimization of product features, user experience, and performance has enabled TikTok for Business to achieve remarkable success globally.

On the product interface side, it evolved from having no designer involvement at the start to incorporating unified branding, styles, functional components, and copywriting.

 

As I mentioned, with the migration of ad platforms from the mainland China version, the TikTok ads platform faced numerous challenges：

  • Major agencies and key clients make up the primary revenue stream for 巨量引擎 (ByteDance's domestic commercial products). These major clients have a much higher level of understanding of the advertising market compared to overseas clients. This was an early and counterintuitive insight we discovered.

  • The overseas market is more complex, with small and medium-sized clients (who have a lower level of understanding) having a higher churn rate. Providing a better experience for them is our main challenge.

 

A Roadmap to develop SMBs marketing solution

Since the platform's major clients are primarily engaged through sales and operations teams, optimizing the overall platform experience has been a journey focused on making the platform increasingly better at serving small and medium-sized clients.

 

Multiple product for different level of users/ TT 广告投放平台整体架构

 

My Role

  • Dec 19 ~ April 21 Worked on TikTok ads manager self serve platform with executives to shape and illustrate the new strategy, such as user story, user flow, mock-ups, etc.

  • May 21 ~ Present Led design team to iterat every release of TikTok ads manager self serve platform.

Challenges

  1. Significant differences in client behavior between overseas users and Chinese users.

  2. Limited understanding of overseas advertisers.

  3. Difficulty in satisfying the diverse needs and levels of advertisers globally.

 

Approach

My design philosophy is always user-centric. Our design team leverages data feedback, including user behavior data and commercial data, along with user interviews conducted with our clients, to deepen our understanding of our customers continuously.

 

Since the platform's major clients are primarily engaged through sales and operations teams, optimizing the overall platform experience has been a journey focused on making the platform increasingly better at serving small and medium-sized clients.

The image below highlights the key releases we initially launched specifically for small and medium-sized clients.

User understanding

Key characteristics of overseas long tail SMB:

  • Resource and time contrained

  • Running business & marketing by themselves

  • Less knowledge in tech or online marketing

  • Low to medium marketing budget

Create persona with DS&Researcher by using card sorting

 

Experience improvement

This doesn't include product features, design, or user interface improvements.

To better adapt to overseas markets, the design focuses on transforming the user experience from this perspective.

  • Enhancement of brand identity.

  • Development and upgrading of the overall design system/components.

  • Customized designs for different customer segments.

 

Next, I'll showcase a small part of this extensive project.

层次结构/information hierarchy

语言适配场景/multiple language adoption

搜索和选中结果的优化/polish the research&selected state

#Creation-Campaign level

Self serve Phase 1

Reduce advertising objectives from 7 - 3

The campaign page only display top 3.
campaign objective for SMB advertisers. In order to avoid confusion. Plus, still gives freedom to explore.

#Creation-ads level

Folding infrequently used information

We work with DS to choose to fold most of the options that users do not use based on the their behavior data.
Actually those displayed information were created for high level advertisers instead of SMBs.
Plus, we give each option as much autofill as possible.

#Creation-Creative level

Use AI power to helping clients to create their own ads

After interviewed clients, and we choose to use AI powered capability.
Instead of let SMBs created ads by themselfs, we choose let machine to autofill effects, ads text, profile images for clients.

In phase 2, we also invited our clients to use their TikTok post as their ads creative.

Before product development, we use Usability Testing to collect feedback on our design

#Campaign Dashboard

Deliver simplified version of dashboard in order to give clients clear direction of what is next step.

Catalog sales advertisment objective