Google AdWords policy

Lead content designer
Google AdWords, 2015-2017

What I did

The ad policies on the Google AdWords (now Google Ads) platform were a convoluted mess of grandfathered rules and temporary updates documented in sedimentary layers. I joined the initiative to completely revamp them, and I reorganized and simplified the policies so that the rules were easier to understand and policy violations were easier to fix.

AdWords old editorial policy

After

AdWords new editorial policy
AdWords status taxonomy exercise

Organizing through taxonomy

The writing wasn’t the hard part; it was figuring out how to organize such an enormous pile of information. I spent weeks in a series of sprints, creating multiple versions of a taxonomy with PMs and legal counsel, and eventually consolidated all the potential violations to a much simpler list. After that, I spent even more time going back and forth with lawyers about how to turn legally defensible language into terms that users also understand. It was a massive effort, but the results were obvious: We reduced support calls by 150,000/week and reduced response times for appeals from 3 days to 1, all without any additional headcount.

Before