AdWords Policy
Google
2015-2017
Google AdWords was (and still is) Google's cash cow, but if you'll excuse a mixed metaphor, that cow was getting a little long in the tooth. The company started multiple projects to improve the vampire cow, and I was assigned to be the lead content designer for the policy team as they completely overhauled the rules that govern what advertisers can display in their ads. (Note: Google AdWords is now known as Google Ads)
The problem
AdWords' policies were in bad shape after years of piling minor updates and clarifications on top of each other.
See an example page from the Wayback Machine
Advertisers weren't receiving consistent or helpful guidance when an ad was disapproved in AdWords, and there was widespread dissatisfaction with the whole process.
The solution
I worked directly with a designer, PM, and many lawyers to go through all the various types and topics of enforcement. Despite exceeding the daily recommended exposure to legal topics, we taxonomized and re-organized the entire set of principles and policy violations over the course of months.
We created a set of rules (e.g. We can have categories and sub-categories, but no sub-sub-categories) to guide how we would explain the violations to advertisers, and then I came up with a consistent naming structure and information architecture that would clearly identify the scenarios where AdWords would block an ad. This process turned 19 long policy pages into 23 pages that were both simpler and more specific.
See an example page from the Wayback Machine
In this example, we specifically reorganized the entire editorial policy to make it clearer what exactly went wrong instead of leaving the advertiser to guess because the previous policy violations were grouped so broadly.
I worked with the UX designer to create a new system of notices in the AdWords interface to clearly state the reason that an ad was suspended and lead the advertiser to specific guidance for fixing it.
The UX designer and I also took the opportunity to retaxonomize and rename the various ad statuses. Many of them weren't useful to the advertiser or weren't clear to anyone. They revealed more about the AdWords backend than the status of the ad. These new names better explained the status of an ad or campaign at a glance.
While Google's ad policies have continued to evolve since then, the framework I helped create is still in place and has made it possible for other teams to update policies seamlessly and clearly.
See a current example of the same policy page
There's plenty more to the story, including overhauling the email notices, managing 430+ batches of translations (totaling over 80k words in English), and overseeing a multi-stage rollout of policy changes over the course of months, but that's got to be enough policy nonsense for one day.
If you’ve got a hankering for more policy content, I’ve included before and after shots of the disapproval email. Believe it or not, all the useful info is still there with a fraction of the words.
And that is the motto of content design.
Highlights
Reduced support contacts by 150,000
Response time for appeals reduced from 3 days to 1 day
0 operations headcount increase
80,000 words in total; translated into 73 languages
Better adherence to regulatory requirements
I received two spot bonuses