Scaling Campaign Creation for Walmart Ad Center

The conditions described above were already understood across the organization. My next step was to articulate the implications for Ad Center, validate them with cross-functional partners in Product and Engineering, and align the design team around them.

Rather than solving these issues independently, I proposed a more ambitious direction: create a campaign setup flow that could onboard new advertisers into display advertising, preserve power for advanced users, and serve as a general framework for campaign creation across the Ad Center product suite.

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The final framework separated campaign-level decisions from ad group-level decisions. Campaigns handled shared settings like objectives, schedule, and budget, while ad groups handled repeated tasks like targeting, bidding, and creative. This reduced duplicate configuration and made it easier to scale a campaign from one ad group to many.

It also created a clearer mental model. Rather than forcing users through a single long form, the experience exposed the structure of the system itself: define the campaign, then create and refine ad groups within it. That model worked for small advertisers creating a first campaign and for experienced users managing more complex media plans.

Three principles shaped the solution: expose system state to reduce ambiguity, pace complexity through structured sequencing, and create confidence early through quick wins. Those principles carried across the details page, ad group templates, forecasting, and creative setup.

Objectives did more than label a campaign. They provided intent to ad serving systems and gave the interface a way to adapt guidance for the advertiser. By asking what the user was trying to achieve early, the flow could make later decisions feel contextual rather than arbitrary.

Shared settings like schedule and budget defaulted to the campaign level so users did not need to re-enter them for every ad group. More advanced controls were still available, but they appeared in a structure that matched the hierarchy of the campaign rather than as one more set of disconnected form fields.

The details screen also made system state visible. Users could see what was complete, what was still in progress, and which settings were constraining performance. That transparency was important for novice advertisers because it turned campaign creation into a set of legible decisions instead of a black box.

Templates helped bridge the gap between an empty state and a finished ad group. Instead of asking new advertisers to invent a strategy from scratch, the product could suggest common starting points like recent customers, likely customers, or key category pages.

This turned best practices that had been buried in documentation and training into usable product affordances. Templates reduced the activation energy of getting started, but they also preserved a path to mastery by allowing advertisers to edit, expand, or ignore the recommendation once they understood the system better.

In other words, templates were not an “easy mode.” They were a way to give users an informed starting point while keeping them inside the same core campaign model used by more advanced advertisers.