Optimizing Wayfair Ads Dashboard
Making campaign performance understandable and actionable
UX Research, UXUI Design, Product Ideation, Product Strategy
Case Study at a Glance
My Role
I led UX design for campaign analytics and optimization, including problem framing, competitive research, interaction design, and final prototyping. I collaborated with project managers on research and product strategy.
Before
I helped redesign the advertising experience around three principles:
01 Define Intent
Introduce goal-based campaign creation so sellers can explicitly state whether they are launching a product, promoting bestsellers, clearing inventory, or running a standard campaign.
02 Diagnose performance
Translate raw metrics into campaign health, root-cause insights, and explanations of what the ad system can actually influence.
03 Guide the next action
Prioritize the highest-impact opportunities and turn diagnosis into specific recommendations around controllable levers such as bid value and budget cap.
The Result
The concept shifts the experience from a dashboard that reports performance to one that helps sellers:
Final Prototype
The Challenge
The platform showed metrics, but not meaning
The existing dashboard surfaced campaign details and performance metrics, but it did not give sellers a clear way to understand campaign goals or assess campaign health.
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This also created a second-order operational problem:
Why does it matter?
Low Clarity Created Costs on Both Sides
Suppliers
Confusion and Low Confident
Wayfair
Operational Drag and Missed Growth
This limited scalable growth and created avoidable operational burden, and led to lost revenue.
Research
Research approach
We started by looking both outward and inward.
Outward
First, we reviewed campaign creation and management patterns across major platforms, including Google, Meta, Amazon, Walmart, Instagram, and Carousell. The goal was to understand common ad workflow structures and identify UX patterns that reduced friction for advertisers.
In our review of ad platforms, Google Ads distinguished itself with a range of UX features that effectively support sellers throughout the campaign workflow.
Inward
Second, we built an understanding of how Wayfair suppliers manage campaigns and prioritize advertising goals.
High-Touch Vendor Growth Model
Wayfair’s growth model relies on SAMs (Strategic Account Managers) and SMEs (Subject Matter Experts) to directly support vendors, drive sustainable ad growth, and build long-term relationships through multifaceted account management.
Multi-Product Campaign Complexity
Ad campaigns often include multiple products with different goals, adding complexity to performance tracking.
Product-Related Goals
Suppliers primarily use advertising to drive product outcomes rather than brand awareness
Launching new products
Promoting bestsellers
Clearing excess inventory,
Additionally, we gathered core insights from account managers on how they evaluated campaign performance, supported sellers, and decided which optimization actions to recommend.
These conversations helped us understand where and how the product could provide more guidance.
Know What You Can Influence
Not every performance issue can be solved through advertising. Some are driven by campaign settings, while others come from product or conversion factors.
High RoAS (Return on Ad Spend) Can Hide Growth
A very high ROAS did not always indicate optimal performance. In some cases, it suggested that sellers were bidding too conservatively and limiting potential sales volume.
Guidance Should Match Maturity
Newer sellers need clearer guidance, while advanced sellers need deeper analytics and faster control.
Ideation & Design
Problem Framing
Based on the findings, we reframed the challenge into three linked UX problems.
3 Key Problem Statments
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Lack of Categorization Based on Seller Goals
Sellers couldn't define clear goals when launching a campaign, making it difficult to measure success.
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Difficulty Understanding Campaign Performance
Campaign metrics were presented in an overwhelming and aggregated way, with no clear structure.
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Lack of Clarity on Campaign Optimization
Sellers didn’t know what to fix or where to focus their efforts.
Framing the Design Opportunity
Based on the problems we identified, We evaluated seven ideas against reach, impact, confidence, and implementation effort. Goal-based workflows and automated diagnosis emerged as the strongest opportunities.
Problem + Solution + Impact
The UX opportunity framing gave us three product strategies and thier potential impact:
01 Goal Alignment for Campaigns
02 Campaign Performance Visibility
03 Automated Campaign Optimization
How would the prioritization and optimization work?
Building a Root-Cause Diagnosis Framework
Designing for diagnosis, not just detection
We designed a root-cause framework that mapped campaign performance into clear diagnostic paths. Campaigns were first grouped by performance, then broken down into likely issues, each tied to a probable cause and recommended next step.
Prioritizing High-Impact Insights
Turning performance signals into prioritized actions
We prioritized insights based on two factors: business impact and actionability.
By connecting outcomes like ROAS to controllable levers such as bid and budget, the system could identify which intervention was most likely to improve performance—and surface that action first.
RoAS Efficient Frontier
Explaining when efficiency limits growth
A high ROAS can look like strong performance, but it may also signal underbidding and untapped sales volume.
We explored the ROAS Efficient Frontier to show when increasing bids could unlock more demand while maintaining efficient returns. It appeared only when the system detected low bids paired with unusually high ROAS.
Solution
From reporting to guided optimization
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Color systems that align with Wayfair’s internal visual system
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