The art of persuasion: Improving digital ad quality

Internet companies face staff competition to attract ad revenue. Advertisers expect online media firms to offer sophisticated, segmented, and discrete approaches. Customers want to be confident that their ads – backed by solid analytics – will appear in front of the right people, generate real leads, and produce reliable sales.

Our client, a leading technology company, hosts billions of customer ads each year. To stay ahead of the pack, it needed to help its customers enhance their ad copy and provide reliable performance metrics. This called for a more robust advertising ecosystem.

To help its customers shape effective ads, the enterprise worked to address three key points.

1. What did an advertiser hope to achieve from the ad? For example, was it to collect leads, increase the conversion rate, or just spread awareness?
2. What was the theme of the advertiser's landing page – the webpage supporting a specific campaign?
3. Did the ad copy match the information on the landing page?

Though the company used technology to help with these reviews and automatically suggest better, more personalized ads, it needed to improve the processes behind them that also checked that ads complied with the company's policies.

Though there were multiple partners working on ad creation and quality, there was little transparency across their operations, processes were not aligned, and there were varying levels of performance. The company wanted standard approaches and governance across the ecosystem to enhance ad quality and the customer experience.

Having previously partnered with Genpact and seen the impact of our analytics capabilities, the internet firm was confident we could help again.

We addressed this challenge with our Lean Six Sigma mindset – using qualitative and quantitative methods, such as statistical analyses and process mapping – to understand and improve the way work was done. The goal? To increase performance, reduce variations, and detect errors in processes, such as broken links.

We created an extra layer of governance across the company's partners and provided a consistent picture of their activities.

We found that each agent handled copy for about 160 ads a day and ran 15 quality checks for each one. That amounted to 2,400 decisions per shift. At the same time, agents had to manage country-specific nuances and websites that change frequently. Through no fault of their own, mistakes crept in.

We worked with the company's partners to set overarching performance parameters for managing ad quality. With their input, we introduced metrics designed to reduce rework. And we established standard operating procedures that, for example, handle errors.

At the same time, we analyzed ads across 15 industries. We categorized different elements, such as what business the advertiser wanted to promote, what attracted customers, relevant hyperlinks, and links to relevant subpages. We used these insights to create guidelines that help improve ad quality.

The technology we implemented helps agents by automating certain processes, offering insights, and alerting them when ads don't comply with policies.

To keep things on track, we held regular calibration meetings and workshops to discuss policy details, process standardization, insights from trends we observed, and ways to enable continuous improvement. This effort paid off. Our transparent methods won the trust of all partners, which helped us establish the final, conclusive steps and routines that ads must go through before they go live.

During our engagement, we increased quality of operations to meet 99%. We've simplified the processes considerably and rework is down substantially, too.

We boosted the impact of ads with stringent checks on ad copy and websites. The new standards mean the company can filter out prohibited political, drug-related, or otherwise inappropriate ad material, improving end users' experience.

With enhanced governance in place, we're set to continue improving ad quality and process productivity and draw even more marketers to the internet company's door.