Nykaa — AdTech Platform
Giving brand managers a self-serve ads console. A single place to launch placements on Nykaa, see live performance, and iterate creatives — reducing manual coordination and speeding up time-to-market for new campaigns.
TL;DR
- Built a self-serve campaign console from scratch — brand managers launch placements on Nykaa without a Nykaa rep in the loop.
- Designed a unified live performance view (Impressions, Clicks, CTR, Add to Cart, Orders, Revenue) with section-level breakdowns across Banner, Category in Focus, In the Spotlight.
- Drove adoption across thousands of brand-manager seats and reduced support tickets significantly. Faster go-to-market for every campaign on Nykaa.
Brand-manager persona
The product call started here. Most ad platforms (Google Ads, Meta Ads Manager) are built for ad-ops specialists who use them daily. Nykaa's brand managers are not those people. Designing for them as if they were is the most common failure in B2B SaaS.
Persona ≠ stock photo. The full persona was built from 14 interviews with brand managers across 3 verticals (beauty, FMCG, fashion). This composite captures the patterns we saw repeated across all 14.
From concierge to self-serve
Before this platform existed, Nykaa's ad business ran as a concierge. The flow looked like this:
- Brand manager emails Nykaa rep with a creative brief.
- Rep parses the brief into a spreadsheet.
- Rep configures the campaign in an internal admin panel.
- Rep emails brand manager a screenshot for approval.
- Campaign goes live (3-7 days later).
- Rep emails a PDF performance report 2 weeks in.
This flow scaled to ~50 brands. At ~500, it broke. At thousands, it was on fire. The mandate was simple — brand managers should be able to log in, launch a campaign, and see it go live themselves. Reps freed up for strategic conversations (campaign planning, partnership), not campaign config.
The reframe wasn't "build an ad platform." It was "build the workflow Priya already has in her head, and remove every step that doesn't add value to her."
3-tab IA rationale
When you study what brand managers actually do on Nykaa, three jobs emerge. We made each its own tab — and refused to add a fourth.
Why three tabs, not seven? Because Priya doesn't have time to learn seven concepts. The platforms that try to give her seven (the Google Ads / Meta school) lose her at the second one. Three is the cognitive ceiling for a non-daily user.
Killed in v1: a drag-drop campaign builder, a "negative keywords" advanced targeting feature, a multi-brand reporting view. All right calls eventually — but not in v1, where the leverage was making the basic loop frictionless.
Creative review workflow
The single most-asked question in user testing: "What's happening with my ad?" Brand managers don't have time to email a rep to find out. So we made the answer visible — at all times, on every creative — through three explicit states.
The state is rendered per creative format — not per campaign. A campaign might have its Square (1:1) format approved, its Horizontal (2:1) pending, and its Vertical (3:4) needing changes. Brand managers see exactly where to focus and what to fix.
The image upload component became the most-tested part of the platform. Brand managers upload one creative; the platform auto-fits across Nykaa's 4 placement formats (Square 1:1, Horizontal 2:1, Vertical 3:4, Horizontal 4:1) and surfaces "Change Required" on any format that needs human adjustment.
Performance hierarchy
The metric vocabulary on the platform is exactly six items, in this order: Impressions, Clicks, CTR, Add to Cart, # Orders, Revenue. Same metrics, same order, at every scope — campaign, ad, section, tag. The brand manager never has to translate between scopes.
Why the hierarchy matters: it follows the actual funnel. Impressions (top), Clicks (interest), CTR (efficiency), Add to Cart (intent), Orders (conversion), Revenue (outcome). Brand managers reading right-to-left can answer the only question that matters: "is the spend paying off?"
Above the metric strip: Attribution Window as a primary chip (1 Day / 14 Days). Most ad platforms bury this in advanced settings. We surfaced it because the answer to "is this paying off?" is meaningless without it.
Trade-offs
Three-tabs-only meant some advanced workflows (multi-brand reporting, custom segment builders) didn't ship in v1. We lost a small group of power users who were doing more sophisticated work. They came back in v2 — but the cost was real.
Auto-fitting creatives sometimes made aesthetic calls a brand manager would have made differently. The "Change Required" state was the safety valve. Net positive — but reviews ate cycles.
Outcome
The platform freed up Nykaa's ad-ops team for genuinely strategic conversations — campaign planning, creative direction, partnership strategy — instead of campaign config. Brand managers got the speed they needed to test more ideas in less time.
What I'd change
I'd have invested in onboarding for first-time brand managers sooner. Our launch focused on making the platform obvious from cold, and it mostly was — but a 2-minute guided first-campaign flow would have raised week-1 retention. We added it in v2; should have been v1.
And: I'd have shipped a cross-campaign dashboard from day one. Brand managers running 5+ campaigns at once needed a "portfolio view" that we didn't ship in v1. They got it in v2 — but we left some of the most engaged users frustrated for a quarter.