How a conversational design led to an 8% increase in ad revenue

Here’s how a couple of simple design tweaks made a sizable difference in our ad revenue.

🔦 The problem

Ads are an effective growth lever for any growing business. In Meesho, many sellers use ads daily and harness more orders than those who did not by reaching out to more potential buyers. But we observed most of these sellers create their ads with the least allowed budget.

You might think it’s a fair call. Because people are conscious of their spending. Especially if they don’t have previous experiences in advertising.But there is a catch.The campaign budget gets utilized based on the clicks the catalogues are getting.

More clicks mean more chances of conversion, especially for a good ROI campaign.But this minimum budget now limits the catalogue from reaching its fullest potential.

Ads with good conversions are paused swiftly due to budget exhaustion.And sellers realize it very late, losing a lot of potential conversions they would have gotten if it ran longer.

🤷‍♂️ Why are the sellers choosing a minimum budget?

We called sellers to reason this behaviour:

• They don’t know what’s the ideal budget to put: They are confused. Whether it’s small or too much. Which in turn leads to increased cognitive friction.
• Sellers with no prior experience with ads treat their initial campaigns as an experiment: it takes a few campaigns for them to get a hang of it. Which makes them lean towards the minimum budget to be conservative.

🧐 Analysing the old design

A thorough analysis of the old design lead to the discovery of some areas of improvement:

• Decision-making creates friction: The design flow fell short in helping sellers choose an ideal amount. This caused hesitation and confusion as a lot of sellers were unsure what the optimal amount for their products was, thus causing them to abandon the process altogether.
• Bias/ anchoring: The upfront communication of the minimum budget, “minimum amount is ₹300”, is biasing or anchoring the users’ decisions.
• Non-contextual recommendation: Though we have a recommendation in place, it’s not helping the users at all. Because it’s based on a static value: ₹300 per catalog. And there is no thought-through logic other than nudging sellers to choose a bigger value. Also, it doesn’t convey why they have to adopt it and how it benefits them.
• Poor copy: Words like ‘denominations’ are hard for some users to understand.

✨ Redesigned budget selection

• Recommended budget: we made a recommendation modal that predicts the ideal budget based on the catalogs sellers have selected. This removes the pain of decision-making from the users. And we pre-filled it to reduce the pain even further.
• Removed upfront communication of min budget: we got rid of the upfront communication of minimum budget which biases and anchors their decisions.
• Conversational feedback: we converse and guide the users when they type in manually to make a better decision.
• Visual signifiers for inclusiveness: we’ve used icons and colours to remove the language barrier and to make it more scannable and accessible.

🚀 Impact!

• campaigns created above min budget increased by 120%.
• Seller order revenue through ads increased by 7.5%.
• Ad-Revenue increased by 7%.
• ~50% of sellers adopted Budget Reco.
• We also did an A/B with the recommended budget pre-filled and non-prefilled. And you know what, the non-pre-filled performed as equal as the pre-filled one. This means people are consciously opting for the recommendation.

🎉 Shoutouts

Cheers to those who’ve put their heart and soul into it.Huge shoutouts to Shubham Sureka and Shikhar from the product team, and Vidya and Abhinav from the design team.

Big thanks to Usman Zafar for helping me write and stitch this into a wonderful story!P.S. Today the adoption has reached 65%. 🔥