UX Writing for Meta Ads Manager

Technical writing isn’t very sexy. Especially not when it’s on a tool like Ads Manager, which is reluctant to change due to the billions of euro that are generated at its status quo design.

Still, tools develop further, and users should ideally be made aware of this. That’s what this project was about.

Why engage in the first place?

Meta introduced deep linking for its app advertisers. This allowed advertisers to link from an ad directly to a product — this was especially useful for clients such as Amazon, who targeted users with specific products that they could they convert with one click. It saved users multiple clicks from ad to check-out and thus increased the likelihood of return-on-ad-spend (ROAS).

However, we needed to make Ads Manager users aware of this change.

Explaining a technical change to advertisers

Deep linking can be a complicated process for engineers to set up. Advertisers, however, don’t care. They just want to know how to effectively use it.

That’s where I came in. My job was to utilize the existing UX design system to communicate the change in our ad formats and how to apply them.

I did this by first asking lots of questions to our engineers to as to understand how this update affects our advertisers, why they should care, and how they can leverage it.

I then consulted with my UX designer to understand which design templates were most appropriate here. We settled on the release notes, as well as the info template you see on the right.

Let’s get writing

Next, I re-desinged and worded the “Destination” section and wrote up these info boxes in every-day, non-engineer wording so as to guide advertisers through the process of employing deep links to boost their ad revenue. This also included error messages and guided blog articles that you can find here.

Reviewing with all stakeholders

One challenge to working on products that reach billions of people across the world? Legal and design reviews. This seemingly small change to Ads Manager was held up against a design rubric so as to ensure it conformed to Meta design principles. This review required the justification of decision-making with regards to word-choice, sentence structure, and content.

The fun part!

This UX writing change to Ads Manager secured millions in revenue within months. Amazon Prime attributed its best performance on prime day towards this update and in general, feature uptake was immediate and consistent following the feature release.