The team:

The Analytics, Insights, and Measurement group is a horizontal team that sits across Google Ads and Analytics products. Within the Analytics, Insights, and Measurement group, I am a member of a smaller, recently formed team focused on understanding first-party data usage by advertisers.

First-party data represents a critical solution for advertisers to address the loss of third-party data due to increasing privacy regulation, specifically the deprecation of third-party cookies in Chrome and GDPR.

Initial foundational research conducted by my team on advertiser usage of first-party data uncovered an essential role that we knew next to nothing about: a technical data practitioner who likely spent most of their time in data tools, and did not use Google Ads, but who was necessary to create new data pipelines between advertisers’ first-party data storage products and Google Ads.

My role:

I joined the team on a 7-month contract to backfill a team member on parental leave. During that time, I ramped up quickly, completed a two-phase research project, presented my work to our team’s UX Manager and Senior Manager, and had my work featured in an annual research summit at Google called Insights Palooza.

My projects:

For the first phase of my project, I conducted a literature review, audit of existing personas, survey analysis, and stakeholder interviews.

The work resulted in:

1. A high-level framework showing how data personas fit into the Google Ads product ecosystem

2. Three defined data persona sub-profiles:

   1. Primary user of Google marketing & measurement tools

   2. Secondary user of Google marketing & measurement tools

   3. Out-of-Product Decision Maker of data & measurement tools

3. A user journey map outlining each sub-profiles’ core tasks across the Advertiser journey

For the second phase of the research, I honed in on an unexplored fourth data persona that emerged during my literature review and survey analysis: a “Unicorn” marketer who had technical expertise and managed sophisticated data tasks in addition to day-to-day marketing operations.

Since this persona was new, aligning with the team on how we defined them was key to the success of this research.

I planned a study to interview 7-10 Unicorn marketers to understand the mental model that guides how they manage data at a campaign vs. account level, and to guide new features being built for the newly launched Google Ads Data Manager.

Link to case study