Contextual Targeting | Product Designer

Context

What is The Trade Desk?

The Trade Desk is a global advertising technology platform that helps brands and agencies buy digital ads across the internet.

Advertisers and agencies leverage our demand-side platform to buy digital advertising space in real-time across multiple channels (display, video, audio, native, and connected TV).

...and what is the Contextual Marketplace?

The Contextual Marketplace allows advertisers to target the most suitable contexts to show their ads, and avoid the offensive ones, ensuring ads appear in the right place, at the right moment.

This targeting tool has shown signs of growth as the advertising industry shifts towards more privacy-friendly practices, an alternative to identity-based advertising.

Kokai's Programmatic Table with Contextual highlighted

The Trade Desk's Kokai, launched in 2023

Defining the Problem

The problem, from the business lens

When first onboarding to this project, the problem seemed straightforward from a business perspective. Two clear issues were outlined:

1

Advertisers tend to only leverage one data provider per ad group

Each provider's data that is targeted is charged at full price. No boolean/dynamic logic provided in strategy building. Users need to include OR statements.

2

Millions in revenue opportunity is missed

In 2024, The Trade Desk tripled the amount of contextual data providers on the platform. Certain providers are unfairly leveraged more than others.

Real ad group example where the advertiser has chosen to block multiple segments from only TTD's segment offerings

Driving clarity in ambiguity

But the project started out with an overly simplified scope. What started as a simple "boolean logic feature" quickly revealed itself as a fundamental gap in how users approach contextual targeting.

Stage 1 | Uncovering the Real Scope

Conducted stakeholder alignment sessions across engineering, product, and data teams
Recognized we were building an entirely new user mental model, not just a feature
Led project rescoping to avoid throwaway work and set realistic timelines

Stage 2 | Foundational Understanding

Brought in UX researcher for foundational user interviews with key traders
Facilitated working sessions with backend data team to understand technical constraints
Aligned cross-functional team on core user problems vs. surface-level requests

User flow diagram showing contextual strategy building process

User pain points from UXR

1

Reusable strategies

Users clone campaigns to avoid setting up targeting/blocking strategies over and over again— but this is fragile and highly error-prone.

2

Strategy management

Contextual groups should be able to be used across multiple ad groups in a library at the advertiser-level.

3

A need for more transparency

Pricing and metrics provided are opaque.

The Problem

How might we...

1

Incorporate boolean logic to accommodate pricing concerns

2

Allow users to duplicate, maintain, and reuse targeting strategies

3

Translate complex backend data structures in a usable way

The Solution

Contextual building blocks

Most Granular

Segment ≈ custom category

Categories of URLs, app IDs, content signals, etc. by topic from 3rd party contextual data partners & in-house offerings

Data group

Group of segments that are targeted or blocked within a contextual strategy.

Data groups can be reused if they're saved and managed in the saved data group library at the advertiser-level.

Most Broad

Contextual strategy

Collection of targeted and/or blocked data groups combined into one strategy.

Contextual strategies can be reused and managed in the contextual strategy library at the advertiser-level.

Contextual building blocks in the campaign hierarchy

This is how these building blocks fit together in our campaign structure, with contextual strategies and data groups managed at the advertiser level alongside existing tools.

At the campaign level, each ad group connects to one contextual strategy. A single strategy can be shared across multiple ad groups and contains various data groups made up of targeting segments or custom categories.

Campaign hierarchy showing how contextual strategies, data groups, and segments connect

Contextual strategy creation

@ the ad group level

Applying and editing a saved strategy