Business and User Experience Goals need not conflict !
Often pressures on revenue can result in actions that inversely impact User Experience. I challenged my team to ideate on new ways to monetize and distribute search without impacting user experience. Interesting new concepts were tested for the first time with positive results.
Throughout 2014, a small team of designers was focused on monetization and new ad formats. This team ran close to 25 experiments every quarter to optimize for revenue resulting in 19% YoY growth through search-click driven revenue. Also ran around 40 experiments yearly to distribute search on Yahoo network resulting in 6% increase in query volume and 8% increase in downstream revenue.
Similar results were seen on experiments on partner networks like ATT.yahoo.com
Display advertising in Search
Several queries in search can not be monetized through the traditional search advertising marketplace.
Proposed and tried out display brand advertising on direct displays during the March Madness college basketball season
Search Query Retargeting
Display ad retargeting is a well known concept. Proposed a similar concept called “Search query retargeting” in Yahoo mail.
Often people come start with search in order to complete a task but do not complete it in the same session. e.g exploring new insurance deals their car.
In this concept, we filter out the adult, illegal and privacy sensitive queries and surface the other queries in Yahoo mail. This works as a reminder for users to get back to their search and also drives up query volume. A win-win for users and the business.
Elastic Ads
Innovative Ad format that captures the right time when a user is likely to engage with the ad.