Groupon: Campaign Score
Empowering merchants to create high-quality, better-performing campaigns.
Role
Design & Product Strategy Lead
Date
August 2020
Challenge
Self-service campaign creation has reduced the barrier to entry onto Groupon’s marketplace—leading to more businesses and supply on the platform. Without the expertise of Groupon Sales Reps, how do we guide merchants to create higher quality, better-performing campaigns that will benefit consumers, businesses, and Groupon?
Solution
As merchants go through the Campaign Builder, they are provided with relevant recommendations that can improve their estimated performance and campaign quality. Once finished, their campaign is scored, showing them actionable steps to improve their campaign and raise their performance rating before publishing.
The Context
A Shifting Business: Sales Rep to Self-Service
In an effort to increase revenue, scale the company, and cut costs, Groupon had to rethink its business operations and how supply and merchants are brought onto Groupon’s platform. After more than a decade, Groupon was shifting from a bespoke campaign creation with sales representatives to merchant-initiated, self-service campaign creation.
Groupon had focused on bringing new businesses and services onto the platform with hands-on sales rep relationships that yield high-quality, targeted, and relevant campaigns. They bring a human touch and level of expertise that is not very easy to scale. For the first time in a decade, self-service has opened a huge opportunity for businesses to onboard onto Groupon by themselves.
Defining the Problems
PROBLEM 1: Lagging Campaign Quality & Performance 👎
While self-service campaign creation has increased supply to the marketplace, self-service campaigns lagged 60% in weekly/monthly oGP vs. inbound Sales-closed campaigns. Working with the Analytics team, these issues were marked as opportunities for optimization. As of the project’s start, nearly 70%+ of all supply on Groupon’s platform had been launched through self-service, resulting in a big impact on Groupon’s quality, merchants’ performance, and customer experience.
Without the expertise and guidance of Groupon Sales-reps on-tap in a self-service context, how do we guide merchants to create higher-quality, better-performing campaigns, with lower fixes needed—benefitting the merchant, customer, and Groupon?
PROBLEM 2: Campaign Fixes 🔧
Self-service campaigns are vetted by GSO (Global Service Operations) agents. Problems with campaigns will be marked as “Needs Fixing”. This requires manual intervention to get campaigns launched. In June 2020, 42% of campaigns were marked as “need fixing” (25% new merchants, 17% existing merchants).
If merchants create campaigns that don’t sell, their trust & relationship with Groupon is going to erode. We need to offer merchants pricing and discount suggestions so that they can be competitive in their local markets.
Campaign Builder Experience
Give agency to merchants and distill the knowledge of Groupon’s reps by providing contextual and hyper-relevant recommendations to their business type that can improve their performance and campaign quality.
Once finished, their campaign is rated, giving merchants actionable steps to improve their campaign— without being heavy-handed.
Dynamic tips and “tell me why”
While the merchant is moving through the form fields, dynamic tips on the right rail expand, gently drawing attention to recommendations and the reasoning behind them. This encourages them to strive for the best campaign performance.
Build trust through relevant and specific content
Provide business-type & vertical-specific tips and helpful content so that merchants can trust these are tailored to them. This is integral to the quality of the campaign output. The more we emphasize relevant and helpful content, the more the merchant will actually read, trust, and follow recommendations.
Scoring Experience
Score the campaign and provide actionable steps to improve
Instead of preventing merchants from selecting a poor-performing campaign structure during campaign creation (potentially hampering conversion metrics), I allowed them to build their whole campaign first without interruption. If there were issues that might impact their performance, focus the merchant on actionable steps to improve their campaign. I utilized a visual meter (removing the numerical values to reduce confusion of score numbers) —focusing on using positive, encouraging language (i.e. ‘Almost there’, ‘Just a few more steps!” ) to give the merchant a sense of where they fall.
Use positive reinforcement to incentivize merchants to make improvements to their campaign— ensuring conversion.
Bring cognizance to how their inputs can affect estimated performance for present and future campaigns.
If they are graded at “Almost there!”, there are suggestions of what they can do to improve. I made these secondary actions, indicating that this is highly encouraged but still optional. They can still proceed to sign the campaign contract.
If they are graded at “Just a few more steps”, then there are clear performance gaps that would yield a poor-performing campaign—disappointing the merchant, making an uninteresting listing for consumers, and generating less revenue for Groupon.
To reduce the possibility of creating poor-performing campaigns, I disabled the button to proceed to the contract signing step and make the steps to improve, a primary action. This will help drive merchants to take action.
Taking action to improve the score and campaign
If the merchant decides to improve their campaign, they can easily edit one of the action items and are immediately taken to the relevant page where the “problem” fields are now highlighted in yellow, along with their corresponding tips in the right-rail.
Once they address the items and click “Done” they are taken back to the scorecard with “Improved” tags on the items they just completed. This is important to keep them motivated and utilizes positive reinforcement to continue improving their campaign till they are to their desired range.
As another effort to incentivize the merchant to take action, I placed the campaign score on the Contract page. This is a page where they will be signing and submitting their contract, so hopefully seeing that their campaign rating is of average or low performance may stop them in their tracks. There is an easy CTA to go back to the improvement scorecard.
Skipping Improvement
Why does this matter?
As more data is collected, more campaigns are rated, and the scoring-criteria is are improved, the scoring learning model will improve and provide greater value for more merchants.
The scoring model can be leveraged to score existing legacy campaigns that are already live. Merchants can then be notified if their existing campaigns should be improved, how they can improve them, and why they should improve them.
This will continue to bring better-quality and better-performing supply to the platform—benefiting consumers, merchants, and Groupon.