basis streamlined ad campaign workflow

Approach

These projects were part of a dedicated campaign setup and maintenance workstream. As the sole designer on the feature team, I worked across a PM, five engineers, and a UX researcher to move multiple improvements through discovery, definition, and delivery — some small and surgical, others requiring significant cross-functional alignment.

Import Media Plan

The biggest lift in the workstream. Agencies arrive at Basis with campaign data already structured in external documents — media plans, insertion orders, authorization files — and had no path to bring that data in directly. Every campaign setup started with manual re-entry.

Discovery began with user interviews across planning and buying roles, paired with assumption mapping to surface the risks of building file import on top of a media plan grid that was deeply interconnected with other parts of the system. The dependencies were real: we needed to map every downstream impact before committing to an approach.

Despite some internal debate about whether improving the existing UI might deliver more value than building import capabilities, the team aligned around import as the right investment — particularly for onboarding new accounts who were arriving with existing plan structures and needed a faster path to get operational.

I created a detailed user story map with the full team to break down the work and align on requirements, then developed flows at multiple levels of fidelity: a high-level version for stakeholder alignment, and a more detailed version for engineering discussions. Error states and unhappy path flows got particular attention — file imports fail in unpredictable ways, and the experience of recovering from an error needed to be as considered as the happy path.

That attention paid off post-launch. After we enhanced the import flow to allow users to correct errors inline during upload rather than starting over, adoption increased measurably. (Current adoption figures to be added.)

DSP Tracking Pixels

Best practice in digital advertising calls for tracking pixels to be placed one to two weeks before a campaign launches. Basis required a campaign to exist before a pixel could be created — meaning Ad Ops teams were either building empty shell campaigns as placeholders, or scrambling to place pixels late.

We interviewed five users to validate the pain point and understand the full scope of the workarounds being used. The research surfaced something important: users weren't just creating pixels per campaign — they were reusing them at the brand level, across multiple campaigns for the same client. The platform's data model didn't reflect how pixels were actually being used in practice.

Competitive research confirmed that pixel reuse at the advertiser or brand level was standard across other DSPs and ad serving platforms. That gave the team confidence to update the system architecture — removing the requirement to tie a pixel to a single campaign, and enabling users to create and manage pixels independently before associating them with campaigns as needed.

The change also opened the door to a broader vision: a global asset library where pixels, audiences, and eventually creatives could be managed outside the campaign workflow entirely. User feedback during discovery indicated strong interest in global creative management as well, though that was scoped as a separate future effort in order to ship the higher-priority pixel work first. That future effort is now underway — the pixel library has since evolved into a broader Audiences and Attributions space, and work is ongoing to expand its capabilities.

Usage data since launch shows roughly one-third of users now create pixels independently of campaigns. Notably, the heaviest adopters are among Basis's largest customers. A follow-on user interview also revealed that awareness of the feature remains lower than it should be — a finding that points to a discoverability and education opportunity that the team is tracking.

Smaller Enhancements

Three additional improvements shipped as part of this workstream, each addressing a specific friction point that users had flagged:

Alpha sorting of tactics without entering sort mode eliminated an unnecessary workflow step that interrupted the natural editing flow of a media plan. CPC ad serving rate support gave users the flexibility to optimize campaigns toward clicks rather than impressions — a capability some advertisers require and that was previously unavailable in the platform. Local currency and time zone support, though initially delayed on the main platform, was successfully implemented in Basis's standalone DSP application, where it has been particularly valuable for global customers in Latin America. The functionality is now being picked up for the main platform by another team.