Before creating anything new we gathered up all the old ads and looked at them with a more critical design eye, asking ourselves, "How can we make these more effective?" Here's what we concluded:

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• Our use of stock photography severely limited what kinds of images and scenarios we could use. What's more, it often made the ads look very generic and inauthentic and was more difficult to edit. 

• In many cases there was little no text hierarchy, so it didn't give viewers anything to quickly catch the eye or zero in on immediately. 

• Our calls-to-action (buttons) were often generic and could be leveraged to help convey more information.

• Often the copy simply stated a title of a content piece, rather than providing people with a reason to read it or click on that content piece.

Outline a strategy to test

In addition to identifying specific target groups and mapping out detailed user journeys, it was important that we create these new ads with 3 traits in mind: 

• CLEAR – the viewer could easily understand the message and what we were asking them to do​

• COMPELLING – we wanted to create more unique visuals and copy that drew people in 

• CONSISTENT – our art and copy should look and feel similar to one another and to all the other pieces of content on our website 

Create & compare

We created whole new sets of ads with all these changes in mind and watched how they performed over time, so we could compare their performance to the old ad sets. ​

We expected to see a positive change, but the difference in performance of the new ads was even better than we anticipated (see results above).