Self-Serve Rewards Program
B2B, 0-to-1, AdTech
Launched a self-serve rewards program for SMB advertisers, leading to 17% engagement rate in the first month and reduced 240 hours of operational work.
My Role
User Research
Product Designer
User Testing
Team
1 Product Designer (me)
1 Product Manager
4 Engineers
1 UX writer
Duration
3 months
Problem
Manual operation hindered customer engagement
Quantcast is an AdTech startup. It provides a platform for advertisers, mainly large brands and agencies, to plan, run, and measure their digital campaigns. To motivate advertisers to spend more budget on the platform, Quantcast offered bespoke rewards programs that included credits and rebates. The programs were handled manually, involved multiple teams and required heavy operation work. As Quantcast began to expand its platform to small and medium-sized businesses (SMB), it needed a more scalable and accessible rewards program.
Solution
A self-serve experience that is accessible and transparent
The final solution is a self-serve experience for SMB advertisers. This new experience enables users to redeem offer codes, check their reward tier, view available credits and past activities—all in one place in the platform. Once users receive or earn credits, they can easily spend them in their ad sets.
Research
Status quo
I conducted user research to understand the status quote. The current process involved 3 teams: sales, campaign ops and engineering team. There were no user interfaces, either internal or external. Everything was managed and tracked manually, which was operationally heavy and error-prone. Also, because there was no customer-facing UI, we could not engage our growing number of SMB customers. This led to missed opportunities for both customers and the company.
Opportunity
HMW we let customers manage rewards by themselves?
The research revealed that the current process of manually managing rewards for each customer was not scalable. So, how about we providing a self-serve UI for customers to manage rewards on their own? A self-serve experience would not only lift the operation burden from our internal teams, but also provide more transparency and flexibility for the SMB customers.
Design
Page layout and information hierarchy
To begin, I explored several concepts using low-fidelity mocks. I focused on high level layouts and organizing information in a way that made sense to users.
Visualizing reward tiers and quarterly progress
I also explored multiple concepts for the reward tier experience. One challenge was organizing information in a limited space. I interviewed campaign ops to understand which information were the most important to them, and designed the visual hierarchy accordingly.
Reminding users of expiring credits
One business constrain was that credits would expire if not used. I wanted this experience to be transparent with users. After reviewing the workflow, I identified three touch points for the design: when people are adding credits to their account, after the credits have been added, and when the credits are going to expire.
Fitting credits into the ad set workflow
Once users earn credits, they can apply them to fund ad sets instead of using their own budget. So we needed a toggle on the ad set page. One challenge was that the page was long and packed with settings. I explored a few placement options for the toggle, focusing on making it discoverable and fitting into the flow naturally.
Based on feedback campaign ops and consideration for agency users, I placed the toggle within the ‘Budget & Schedule’ section and made it default to off. I also showed the available credits for transparency.
Outcome
17%
account adoption rate in 1 month (goal: 20%-30% in 90 days)
240 hours
operational time saved per quarter
for internal teams