Xandr expands its reach with Heap and Appcues

Building AdTech for advertisers who aren’t tech-savvy

As programmatic advertising expands from display to digitally-connected television, Xandr, AT&T’s data-enabled advertising technology platform, wanted to reach more traditional television ad buyers. Xandr’s existing demand-side platform (DSP) for marketers and agencies is powerful but requires technical skill to use. Xandr turned to Heap to refine their platform's user experience, to drive increased advertising spend.

“We were migrating users from our legacy DSP to a new platform called Xandr Invest,” says Natasha Desai, who manages Xandr’s demand-side platform.“Maintaining their anonymity, we wanted to understand if clients were adopting the new platform quickly, if any were going back and forth between UIs, and if any were not moving at all - And most importantly, pinpoint why a user might be stuck in a certain stage.”

“Heap enabled us to discover points of friction on our platform’s UI — maybe too many clicks to take an action — or where we may have to encourage users to change their behavior.”

Learning from the entire audience

“Heap supports our ability to listen to feedback from everybody,” Natasha says. “We get a lot of feedback from our managed service clients and also from advanced users who regularly make their views known. Other clients, often smaller ones, are less vocal, and Heap gives us a quiet way to anonymously compare the experience of our most vocal clients to the experience of everyone else.”

Giving the right nudges to help each user with Appcues

“As we tracked users in Heap and listened to client feedback, we learned that a lot of users weren’t aware of many new features or how to perform their old workflows with the new platform’s navigation,” Natasha says.

To help users discover the new site’s capabilities, Xandr integrated Heap with Appcues, a service that provides personalized guidance to a product’s users. “We were able to identify segments of users in Heap, then give them an Appcues flow that would take them to where they want to go,” she says.

The Heap and Appcues integration enables Xandr to then collect feedback on the flow to guide further improvements. “If there is a new feature we are developing, we can use Appcues to pop up a targeted survey to collect feedback from users in real-time,” says Marcel Sandoval, Xandr’s Product Manager for their ad buyer experience. ”When we make modifications, we can use Heap to monitor how the usage of the feature changes.”

“Because of the insights we were able to gain from integrating Heap with Appcues, we were able to increase buyer adoption rate of Xandr’s Invest DSP by more than 50% in just one week, leading to 100% adoption of the Invest DSP just a few months later” says Marcel.

From data to insights to action

Once we had the new Xandr Invest platform built out, we could use Heap to see which areas were getting a lot of traffic and needed more investment, and which didn’t,” Natasha says. “Prioritization is a lot easier."

“We also connected the analytics to revenue,” she explains. “That’s what’s important to our leadership team - understanding whether shifting our spend led to a significant lift in revenue, and how we can get our clients to spend more with us moving forward.”