The directive for every business is to innovate with new features, products, or services to solve for real problems customers are facing. The challenge, however, is often in deciding which areas to focus on first, and how best to allocate time and resources in a way that is most impactful for the customers, the business, and the product.

Often, this comes up as a balance between releasing exciting new product lines that let you serve a wider audience, and introducing new features to existing services that will have a significant impact for current customers.

For example, we recently released two new features at AdRoll:

Scheduled Ad Flighting

Scheduled ad flighting makes it easier for advertisers to set up a custom schedule for a given ad group.

Let’s say you’re running a sale during the last week of each month leading to the holidays. Without the ad flighting feature, you would spend a significant amount of time managing campaigns to run ads only during promotion weeks. You might have to pause and resume campaigns manually, or even create different campaigns for each duration. With the ability to customize the schedule and set specific date ranges, you can easily setup or adapt campaigns to different business needs.

We released ad flighting to help customers save time executing campaigns and reduce risks of oversight. Ad flighting is a huge boon for advertisers that run cyclical promotions, A:B testing, or repeated sales.

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Predictive Segmentation

Predictive segmentation provides an advertiser with audience segment suggestions sorted by number of unique visitors. This makes the task of creating functional URL segments simple, painless and more importantly, accurate.  This is a great example of a task that was technically challenging for engineers, but a huge relief to advertisers.

Segmentation is a way to organize user intent for targeted advertising, by grouping customers into different target segments. A smart segmentation strategy is essential to creating a personalized advertising campaign, but oftentimes advertisers are unsure of what segments to create, or how narrow or broad these should be.

One way to help inform this process is to provide suggestions of audience segments based on expected number of unique visitors. Predictive Segment Reach does just that, preventing advertisers from creating very limiting segments with too few users, and providing better predictions for budgeting and performance.


How we prioritize product decisions

While these two new features are improvements to our existing platform rather than entirely new offerings like retargeting on Instagram or integrating with Marketo, we’re still really excited about them, because they make our core Retargeting product work better for advertisers.

When product and engineering get together at AdRoll, we’re always thoughtful about which new efforts we want to prioritize. Some of the factors we consider include:

  • Estimated short- and long- term impact for customers
  • Effort and resources required to build
  • Competitive comparison of players in the market
  • User feedback

The most important of the above factors for us is probably user feedback. We’ve enabled multiple ways for customers to provide us with direct feedback: a dedicated User Research team that focuses on both one-to-one and one to many feedback, NPS surveys, feature requests on User Echo, input from focus groups, etc.

These sources provide invaluable data that helps direct the product in the right direction and inform what features to build. Both Scheduled Ad Flighting and Predictive Segmentation were born out of direct user feedback, and we do hope our advertisers enjoy increased levels of efficiency with these new additions!

Login and try out the new features today, and don’t forget to leave feedback! 

Remember, we take your feedback seriously and this is a chance to directly influence our product direction.