Overview
Twitter's self-serve advertising platform had evolved into a powerhouse for enterprise brands and agencies. But that sophistication came at a cost: small businesses couldn't figure out how to use it. The interface assumed expertise that most SMB owners simply didn't have—complex targeting options, bidding strategies, and campaign structures that made perfect sense to performance marketers but felt like a foreign language to a new marketer, let alone alocal bakery or fitness studio.
The opportunity was massive. If we could create a streamlined experience that set new advertisers up for success, we'd unlock an entirely new customer segment and expand revenue beyond Twitter's traditional enterprise base. In 2021, I took over the initiative.
Background
For years, Twitter's advertising business was built for enterprise customers. The top 20% of advertisers who generated most of the revenue. Big brands with dedicated sales reps and agency teams who knew how to navigate complex advertising platforms.
While Twitter's advertising platform was technically self-serve for businesses of all sizes, the product experience reflected the needs of its most valuable customers. The result was a powerful but complex interface that was daunting for smaller advertisers who lacked the expertise or resources to navigate advanced advertising workflows.
At the end of 2020, Twitter formed a cross-functional team to explore how to diversify and grow advertising revenue from the unmanaged SMB segment. Their initial hypothesis centered on a common industry challenge: the barrier to creating campaigns was too high for new customers, and a simplified workflow tailored to their needs could unlock this market opportunity.
While leading the core Advertiser Experience Design team, I initially supported this effort through consulting and guidance. Progress was slow due to the team's limited understanding of Twitter's advertising platform and the broader industry landscape. To accelerate momentum, I loaned a Senior Designer from the Ads Design team who brought deep knowledge of Twitter's ad platform. This shift dramatically improved velocity and enabled the team to produce simplified workflows that could deliver successful outcomes for the target customer.
In autumn 2021, the VP of Revenue Design moved this initiative directly into my organization, making Simple Ads my leadership responsibility.
Challenges
- The SMB segment was broad and poorly understood. That led to internal assumptions about customer needs that weren't always validated by research or market data.
- Early hypotheses and research didn't consistently align with the actual market opportunity.
- As a new product offering, there was no baseline data to inform decision-making prior to launch.
- Product success metrics emphasized gross revenue goals rather than customer lifetime value. That didn't incentivize educating novice advertisers to become advanced customers, which was a core conviction of the Ads Design team.
- Limited collaboration between the new cross-functional team and the established ads organization created alignment challenges.
- The team needed to ensure the simplified experience addressed distinct customer needs rather than cannibalizing revenue from existing advertiser segments.
Approach
With Simple Ads now under my leadership, I established a focused team structure within Ads Design. I paired two designers to work on complementary SMB initiatives (Simple Ads and Quick Promote), with clear expectations for collaboration and shared principles:
Become segment experts. Each designer owned deep customer understanding for their product, learning everything possible about customer needs and industry approaches to inform their cross-functional partners.
Focus on growth and lifetime value. Rather than optimizing solely for acquisition, the goal was to set new customers up for success and educate them to become more advanced advertisers who could unlock larger budgets over time.
Leverage the existing platform. Instead of building parallel systems, we focused on training customers through content design and streamlined workflows that reduced choices and set smart defaults. We saved custom components for situations where they provided distinct advantages.
Define clear boundaries. We worked with product partners to define what Simple Ads should and shouldn't be, ensuring we optimized within a focused feature set rather than creating another advanced workflow.
Think end-to-end. Customer success extended beyond ad creation, so designers represented their customers' needs across the entire journey, participating in reviews and providing feedback to adjacent teams.
Beyond building alignment within the design team, I invested significant time with VPs, Directors, and managers across Product, Engineering, and Research. The goal was getting everyone rowing in the same direction. I worked particularly closely with Research to tighten how we identified the most valuable market opportunities within this broad customer segment, ensuring we prioritized solving the customer needs that would yield the strongest returns.
Delivery
From late 2021 through 2022, the team defined and shipped the first release of Simple Ads. The Senior Designer collaborated with cross-functional partners to refine designs based on research insights and determine the appropriate scope for the initial launch. They worked closely with broader design and engineering teams to maximize component reuse.
The team began releasing the initial experience to unmanaged SMB customers in Q2 2022. When creating a new campaign, customers could select either the simple or advanced workflow based on their needs. Beyond fewer controls and features, the simplified workflow delivered several fundamental improvements:
Content design was tailored specifically to new or novice advertising customers, using clear language and helpful guidance throughout the process. Every word was carefully chosen to educate without overwhelming, building confidence at each step.
Reduced objectives focused on the four campaign types most likely to deliver success for new advertisers, eliminating decision paralysis while maintaining the sophistication of Twitter's targeting capabilities.
Front-loaded ad creation moved creative development to the beginning of the workflow, giving new customers an immediate visual preview of how their ads would appear. This contrasted with the advanced workflow, where ad creation came last because enterprise advertisers often waited for creative assets from agencies. The preview was designed with accuracy to match what customers would see in production.
Simplified targeting and delivery controls presented only the options most critical for campaign success, removing advanced features that could overwhelm new advertisers.
Inline payment methods streamlined the setup process for first-time campaigns and made it easier for returning customers to update billing information.
Recognizing that some advertisers would outgrow the simplified experience, the designer worked with the team to provide a graduation path allowing customers to convert running campaigns to advanced campaigns, unlocking additional controls when they were ready.
This release represented the beginning of Simple Ads product development. Throughout beta and broader launch, the team continuously analyzed quantitative data to refine target customer profiles and behaviors while exploring future improvements to the end-to-end journey.
Success Metrics
From July 13 to November 1, 2022, Simple Ads demonstrated strong early performance:
Takeaways
Twitter's reorganization ended this effort before we could fully realize its potential, but the initiative provided valuable lessons:
Vision drives strategy. Providing a cohesive vision for customer growth was an excellent tool for influencing product strategy and aligning stakeholders around common goals.
Research must align with opportunity. Tightening the connection between research efforts and market opportunity was critical for prioritizing correctly and maintaining velocity.
Customer-centric incentives scale empathy. By incentivizing the SMB Design team to focus on customer needs rather than just their immediate projects, collaboration increased and customer empathy scaled across the broader team. This model has continued to drive success across subsequent initiatives.
