MyFitnessPal
Leading advertising & monetization for the native mobile app.
The Problem
For the longest time, MyFitnessPal has used display ads as their only design style for ads which haven't performed terribly, but there was clearly a major gap in optimizing the ad experience.
User Need
Track calories and workouts to meet personal goals.
Business Goal
Increase ad revenue through the major user journeys.
The Approach
UX Research
Partnering with the user research and ad team to establish the key user journeys that would potentially give us the highest conversion. After remapping we noticed misalignment in the current positioning of ads.
Key Discovery
What I noticed was that we took an oversimplified approach of putting ads on the major user journeys, but we were not taking into account the user intent within these journeys. This then opened the door for more contextual ads and inevitably the need to fast-track the implementation of programmatic native ads and directly sold ads.
Exploration & Ideation
I established new potential positioning for the ad components and designed iterations for both native and directly sold ad components for testing both moderated and unmoderated.
Testing & Validation
Our testing validated 4 out of the 5 positioning options with 7 difference variations that empowered us to meet all the requirements for the range of options.
Key Decision
Inevitably we had to stagger our approach with directly sold ads primarily because we need to validate the ad slots with actual documented visibility and impact. So we started with programmatic native ads to start the transition away from display ads and also having these ad components fit more seamlessly within the product.
Results, Learnings & Impact
We saw a 39% CTR increase in first month across all the ad components and consequently a major increase in ad revenue. We also validated that with the change of ad positioning that the relative difference in user retention on the respective pages turned out to be pivotal for an increase in visibility and engagement.