Overview
Twitter had no commerce-specific advertising product while Facebook and Google dominated e-commerce with Dynamic Ads. I led the design strategy for Dynamic Product Ads, a zero-to-one initiative to build Twitter's first product-focused ad format and advertiser experience for retail advertisers. I established design representation on the cross-functional leadership team before formal kickoff, leading competitive research and customer-first vision work that informed both consumer-facing ad formats (carousel with pricing, immersive Collection Ads) and advertiser workflows (guided setup, simplified catalog management, integrated measurement). The product launched in Q3 2022 with strong results: carousel ads drove a >70% improvement in purchase-per-impression and >40% decrease in cost-per-purchase, and the Collection Ads beta showed a 72% increase in click-through rate and dwell time.
Building a Commerce-First Advertising Product on a Platform Built for Connection
By 2021, Twitter's performance advertising strategy had become unmistakable: lower-funnel outcomes mattered most. App installs. Website traffic. Purchases. Not impressions or engagement. Real conversion events that advertisers could measure and optimize toward. An internal pitch deck reported by Ad Age (opens in new tab) made the e-commerce opportunity explicit, outlining how Twitter planned to compete for retail advertising dollars. Underneath that strategic bet was a simpler observation: if advertisers couldn't prove that Twitter ads made them money, they'd spend somewhere else.
Our Advertiser Experience Design team had spent the previous three years proving we could move the needle on revenue by reducing friction in the campaign creation process and improving performance outcomes. By late 2021, that work had earned Design a seat at the strategy table. When the conversation shifted toward website advertising (a natural expansion from the mobile app installs we'd been focusing on), it was clear that Dynamic Product Ads would be one of the biggest opportunities within that shift.
The challenge was that Twitter didn't have anything built for retail. Facebook had Dynamic Ads. Google had Shopping Ads. We had a blank page.
The Problem Was Layered
Twitter faced several interconnected obstacles that couldn't be solved in isolation. There was no commerce-specific ad format purpose-built for e-commerce advertisers. The setup process required significant technical coordination: advertisers needed to implement website measurement through Twitter's pixel or Conversion API, import product catalogs into our systems, and navigate a campaign interface that didn't yet exist. Internally, Twitter's commerce team had historically focused on organic engagement rather than advertiser needs, which created gaps that required careful cross-functional alignment across multiple product, engineering, and design teams. And there was the technical constraint of delivering dynamic content within Tweets — objects that had always been treated as immutable and unchanging. Everything about this felt like building infrastructure for a use case that Twitter had never really optimized for.
How We Got Ahead of It
I established one of my direct reports, a Senior Designer with strong research instincts and the ability to operate independently, as the design representative on the cross-functional leadership team. This model had worked well on Advertiser Experience Vision, and it was about to become even more valuable. Before the formal project kickoff, I carved out time for this designer to work ahead, establishing design as a strategic partner from the outset rather than waiting for the problem to be handed off already solved.
The designer's mandate was clear: become expert on how other platforms handled this, map the ecosystem of product surfaces that would need to work together, and articulate an initial vision for what a seamless workflow could look like. It wasn't about designing screens yet. It was about understanding the problem deeply enough that every design decision afterward would feel inevitable rather than arbitrary.
That meant competitive analysis. Deep, sustained attention to how Facebook and Google structured their Dynamic Ads experiences. How they guided advertisers through setup. What cognitive load they placed on users. What they got right. What felt clunky. Not to copy, but to understand the established patterns in the market: the things advertisers expected because they'd done it elsewhere. This work built directly on the competitive gaps the Advertiser Experience Vision had identified across the full advertiser journey.
From there, the designer worked with Product and Engineering to understand what Twitter could realistically build, what constraints we faced, what the longer-term vision could be. Rather than allowing technical feasibility to dictate the experience, we anchored our partners on an ideal customer journey and worked backward to define what the initial release could deliver. That's a more difficult conversation to have than just accepting the constraints you're given. But it's the difference between designing a product and designing a feature.
On the consumer-facing side, we explored modifications to Twitter's multi-destination carousel format and developed a Collection Ad experience that provided an immersive shopping environment. The point wasn't novelty for its own sake. It was recognizing that if an advertiser had invested in Dynamic Product Ads, we owed them ad formats that actually showcased those products well, with shopping-specific calls-to-action and pricing information that felt native to Twitter rather than grafted on.
Over the course of a few months, this designer delivered an end-to-end vision for the ideal advertiser journey. It was ambitious. It wouldn't ship in the first iteration, and we knew that going in. But it anchored the team on a customer-first approach rather than a constraints-first one. It also provided the bridge we needed with the Commerce team. That proof showed Design understood the complexity of what they were trying to build and was invested in making it work.
What We Built
The design process that followed moved through research, iteration, and customer feedback in tight cycles. Research presented prototypes to customers. Designers incorporated that feedback into refined concepts. Customers got another look. That ongoing conversation shaped what eventually became the roadmap for the first release.
From there, the team worked with cross-functional leads to scope what would ship in the initial launch. Some aspects of the workflow needed to be constrained. Others had technical dependencies we had to work around. We broke these into smaller projects and brought in several additional designers from the team to collaborate across Twitter's advertiser-facing surfaces. One designer wasn't going to move the entire product forward. A coordinated team working toward a shared vision could.
The consumer-facing formats introduced a few details worth attention:
Multi-Destination Carousel
Relevant products reached potential customers at the right moment. Each card displayed pricing and shopping-specific calls-to-action: information that made sense in context. The typography, spacing, tap targets, and transitions were all crafted to feel native to Twitter while serving commerce use cases. A carousel that advertised products had to look like it belonged on Twitter, not like Facebook's product ads tacked onto Twitter's canvas.
Collection Ads
We designed an immersive browsing experience that expanded the visual footprint and allowed consumers to explore multiple products without leaving Twitter. Think of it like the difference between browsing a magazine page and walking into a store. The visual real estate gave product discovery space to breathe.
On the advertiser side, we prioritized two things: making the setup process feel guided rather than error-prone, and reducing the number of decisions an advertiser had to make without context.
Selecting Dynamic Product Ads during ad group creation triggered a dedicated path with tailored guidance and constraints. The setup workflow walked advertisers through the specific requirements of this campaign type rather than forcing them into a generic ad creation flow. We simplified catalog management, historically one of the most friction-heavy steps for e-commerce advertisers. And we guided advertisers through implementing website measurement (Twitter's pixel, tag manager, or Conversion API), removing ambiguity from what was technically complex but strategically essential.
Results
Dynamic Product Ads launched in beta during Q3 2022, with full availability arriving in Q4 2022 just before the holiday shopping season. Twitter positioned DPA as one of three new performance advertising products alongside Collection Ads and Website Conversions Optimization, announcing the suite on the business blog (opens in new tab). The launch drew industry coverage from Search Engine Journal (opens in new tab) and Social Media Today (opens in new tab). The results demonstrated meaningful improvements over what advertisers had been using before:
Site Visit Campaigns
Website Conversion Campaigns
Carousel Format with Cta & Pricing
Collection Ad Beta
What It Taught Me
We didn't deliver the full vision. Twitter's acquisition ultimately constrained what we could build and how far we could push the product. But the approach proved valuable, not because Dynamic Product Ads succeeded per se, but because of how we got there.
Establishing a Designer as a strategic partner on the cross-functional leadership team before the formal project began created a different kind of influence than Design-as-execution ever could. When you're the one leading the research, understanding the competitive landscape, and articulating the vision, you're shaping the problem statement itself. That's a more powerful position than being given a problem to solve.
The second insight is about vision and constraints. Most teams default to accepting constraints and designing within them. That's pragmatic and sometimes necessary. But when you design the ideal state first and then work backward, something shifts. The team develops conviction about what's actually worth fighting for versus what's just acceptably feasible. Constraints become choices rather than requirements. And when you eventually have to compromise (which you always do), you're compromising against something clear rather than against nothing.
The work also reinforced that domain expertise matters. Before any pixels moved, the team had spent sustained time understanding how e-commerce advertisers worked, what their workflows looked like on other platforms, and where Twitter's particular constraints created opportunities rather than just obstacles. That grounding in specifics — competitive patterns, technical limitations, customer expectations — is what separated "we built ads with products" from "we built a product-specific ads experience that advertisers actually wanted to use."
