INSTAGRAM CONTINUOUS ADS

THE FEATURE: Launched in 2022 by Instagram’s Ads Growth team, Continuous Ads — a net-new way of advertising on Instagram — allow users to create ads that run indefinitely, until paused, based on their daily budget.

THE GOAL: At the time, 5% of our active monthly advertisers created 15- or 30-day ad campaigns, contributing to 28% of revenue — but only 18% of users finished running these campaigns. We saw a large revenue opportunity if we could increase the completion rate or introduce and encourage ads that run continuously. This feature launch was driven by the latter.

ROLE & RECOGNITION: As the lead content designer, I was recognized by peers, leadership, and our legal partners for influencing the product strategy, driving cross-functional alignment, advocating for metrics integrity, and future-proofing ads experiences across the family of apps.

INITIAL CONCERNS: After joining a team without dedicated content design support prior, I was asked to review the user flows for a new feature that was launching soon — a feature expected to have sizable incremental impact on ad revenue (and key success metrics for this particular team). The designs were near complete, though the information architecture and copy was neither crafted or reviewed by a content designer. Upon reviewing, I surfaced a handful of concerns that I felt needed addressed prior to launch, rather than in future iterations of the product feature. This meant having to adjust our launch timeline (which is never an easy thing to gain consensus for), but I made a case for delaying our launch until we could solve for the following concerns — and my product partners agreed:

  1. Ads, by their very nature, produce all kinds of metrics — including both performance-based insights and metrics related to budget and user spend. Historically, Instagram and Facebook only offered ads that ran for set durations, so associated metrics included things like “total spend” — which implies finality in that the spend is complete. For ads that run continuously, this didn’t feel accurate. And accuracy in an insights and metrics setting is critical — especially when related to user spend — not only for integrity reasons, but legal ones too.

  2. “Continuous ads” didn’t feel straightforward as user-facing language since existing advertisers didn’t have a mental model for what this might mean given that it was a new feature (nor were we offering educational context in the UI upon launch). I was also concerned about the localizability of this language. Secondarily, “continuous ads” — a noun — didn’t mirror other ads-based language in product, which is predominantly verb- and action-based.

SOLUTIONS & OUTCOMES:

  1. I led several discussions alongside our lead engineer with leadership and our Metrics Review Board, in which I introduced a new metric — “amount spent” — citing integrity and transparency issues. Both leadership and the review board agreed with this perspective so adamantly that they decided to replace the existing “total spend” metric with the new “amount spent” metric — not only in Instagram’s insights surfaces but also across Facebook’s insights surfaces. Secondarily, I introduced “daily budget” as a new metric, which was also adopted across Instagram and Facebook. Because both of these metrics and terms were relevant to both standard and continuous ads, they future-proofed other ads experiences as they could apply to all ad types, existing and to-be-invented, going forward.

    Note: Introducing a new metric is a highly complex process and having new metrics and terminology adopted across the family of apps is even more complex, so I consider this one of my greatest achievements at Instagram.

  2. In addition to creating new metrics and terms, I wrote the formal definitions for both, which are displayed across multiple insights surfaces, giving advertisers context and details about calculations.

  3. After doing several localization checks with our translation folks, I decided to use action-based language instead of “continuous ads” that mirrors other ads language in product. I landed on “run this ad until I pause it” in the ad setup flow and “runs until paused” in the review screen for absolute transparency. In the screens below, the language for standard ads includes “set duration” and “finishes in x days” — so this action-based approach ensured consistency.

CONTINUOUS ADS IN CONTEXT

Note: There are capitalization inconsistencies in the screens below because Instagram had just introduced a new sentence-case guideline, so new experiences adhered to the new guidelines while audits were conducted to update existing product experiences that were shipped according to outdated title-case guidelines. During this process, there were product inconsistencies in surfaces that included both new and old features — and, unfortunately, it was usually out of scope for engineering to make edits to entire screens whose elements were often owned by other teams.

SETTING FOR CONTINUOUS ADS

AD REVIEW SURFACE

AD TOOLS (CONTINUOUS & STANDARD ADS)

AD EDIT SURFACE (WHERE A USER CAN PAUSE THEIR AD)

INSIGHTS DEFINITIONS — APPLICABLE TO BOTH INSTAGRAM AND FACEBOOK

INDIVIDUAL AD PERFORMANCE INSIGHTS, DISPLAYING BOTH NEW METRICS

PERFORMANCE NOTIFICATION & REMINDER TO CHECK INSIGHTS

FEEDBACK RELATED TO MY CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE CONTINUOUS ADS LAUNCH

  • “Ashley identified key issues for the continuous ads feature that led to significant restructuring of the experience. Instead of moving forward with an inherited near-complete design, she highlighted concerns and gained buy-in from cross-functional partners to incorporate new terms and definitions, and adjusted the roadmap to accommodate the improved experience. She led the metrics review and worked to ensure metrics were accurately described based on the calculations.”

    — Design lead

  • "Ashley's work was complex and highly sensitive in this project, because the insights updates involved changes to the metrics being displayed and their descriptions. This necessitated a consultation process with other content designers to rewrite the definitions for a company-wide metric with improved accuracy. Ashley and I collaborated on putting together documentation for the review, and because of our joint preparation, the review went very smoothly."

    — Lead engineer

  • "Given the urgency and high visibility of this project, Ashley prioritized this work over other things, and was diligent and timely in making updates requested by the Metrics Review Board. These requests were frequent, and often complicated to keep track of. After every round of updates, Ashley made sure to communicate exactly what changed — and confirm any engineering complexity introduced. That made implementing changes much easier, so I was able to quickly iterate."

    — Lead engineer