Partner Marketplace

AppsFlyer, 2023
Research | Discovery | Prototyping | UX & UI | Dev requirments

Partner Marketplace is a product designed for marketers to help them easily find media partners that best suit their marketing campaign objectives. In the Partners Marketplace, marketers can discover new media sources and platforms that specialize in their vertical, check their services and performance, contact them, and integrate with them. They can also explore and discover new services in other verticals, helping them to grow and evolve.

The Partner Marketplace presents over 10,000 partners from a wide range of types, such as ad networks, marketing partners, agencies, and analytic platforms.These media sources and platforms specialize in different verticals and regions.

The mission

As a market leader in mobile marketing analytics and attribution, with a deep understanding of marketers’ challenges and aspirations, the company I work for identified a new opportunity to connect marketers with media networks through a dedicated Marketplace. I joined AppsFlyer during the Partner Marketplace's initial, lean Alpha stage.

My mission: to spearhead the creation of a user-centric marketplace tailored for User Acquisition Managers (UA managers).

Research

To create a user-centric product that effectively and intuitively helps users achieve their goals, we aimed to understand the UA manager persona and delve into their journey in finding a new media partner—including their considerations, motivations, and the tools available to them. My team and I conducted extensive research involving user discovery calls, internal sessions with Customer Success Managers (CSMs), and comprehensive analysis of industry insights from articles and videos. Throughout our user discovery sessions, we focused on addressing these key questions:

Who is responsible for the decision to expand to new partners, and what drives this decision?
What criteria do you use to search for potential partners?Which platforms do you use to discover new partners?
With whom do you collaborate during the process of finding new partners?
What challenges do you encounter when searching for new partners?

Ultimately, we gained a comprehensive understanding of the UA manager persona, including their job responsibilities and goals. We also gained profound insights into the challenges experienced by our potential users in their quest to discover new media partners, both within and outside our platform.

User journey

As I immersed myself in the world of UA managers, I began connecting the dots to create a comprehensive user journey map. This map captures the UA manager's entire journey of discovering a new partner, starting from the consideration phase, through the search and negotiation processes, and ending with the actual integration with the partner.

This journey map enabled my team and me to gain deeper insights into the UA manager's daily routines and work processes. It allowed us to identify pain points in the user interface of our product and discover new opportunities to enhance the overall user experience.

How did we effectively utilize user research insights to create a meaningful and valuable solution?

In our user interviews, participants outlined their work methods and described various challenges, including manual tasks that lack digital solutions. Throughout this process, several key insights consistently emerged. As I began redesigning the Partners Marketplace, I integrated these insights from the research phase into the design process, ensuring that the primary issues identified were effectively addressed.
Here are some of the main points I tackled through this work:

“It’s challenging to find a partner that fits our specific needs. Locating the right partner often relies on word-of-mouth recommendations, and there isn’t a dedicated platform where we can explore new solutions.”

To address this pain point, we focused on designing an intuitive interface that enables users to easily find the most suitable partner solutions for their campaign objectives:

We introduced personalized partner suggestions tailored to the user’s company data.
We added a ‘match rate’ indicator to identify the most relevant partners based on the user’s data and selected criteria. This match rate reflects each partner’s performance in relation to the applied filters.
We implemented a range of filters to help users narrow their search and discover the best solutions.

"When seeking a new partner, we aim to avoid fraudulent or unreliable partners and ensure they are trustworthy with a proven track record."

To help users make well-informed decisions, we provided partner's performance data and highlighted partners with a proven track record and reliability, enabling users to make confident, data-driven choices.

We added certification badges for partners whose performance has been validated by AppsFlyer.
We displayed each partner's number of integrations and page views to reflect their scale of work and level of interest.
On the partner page, we provided detailed performance data with filtering options to help users explore and assess the partner's capabilities.

"After the lengthy process of identifying a recommended partner that meets our needs, finding the right contact person within that organization remains time-consuming and complex."

To streamline communication with potential partners and accelerate the connection process, we introduced an 'Introduction' feature.

On each partner page, we added an 'Introduce Me' option, allowing users to send an introduction email directly to the specific contact person. This feature facilitates quick and easy connections with potential partners and helps us track user engagement through lead measurement.
We included a section for 'Introduced Partners' to highlight the partners users have reached out to, ensuring they stay informed and organized.

The Partner Marketplace was launched to general availability two years ago, and today it helps thousands of active users find and connect with the best partner solutions for their marketing efforts.

Ongoing research methods

In my ongoing work, I use a variety of research tools to track product usage, assess usability, identify pain points, and continuously improve our solution.

Here are some of the tools I use:

Usability Testing - whether through tools like Maze, session recordings with FullStory, or face-to-face user sessions, I conduct usability tests to ensure that my solutions are intuitive and user-friendly.
User Discovery Sessions - user discovery sessions allow me to engage in open conversations with users, delve into their pain points and needs, and gather their feedback on the product.
A/B Testing - I use A/B testing to compare multiple design options and analyze user behavior, satisfaction, or interactions to make data-driven decisions.
In-App Messaging - by utilizing Pendo’s in-app guides, I gather user feedback on product satisfaction and assess their interest in participating in discovery calls, facilitating faster and more effective feedback collection.
Data Tracking - with a dedicated dashboard, created in collaboration with analysts, I monitor quantitative data on user behavior through specific clicks and funnels to understand user activities and usage patterns.