Switzerland
Advertising
OneAd — A Geo-Based Platform for Booking Ads in Switzerland
OneAd GmbH.
What if users see no value in your product and immediately switch off? How can you win back their hearts? Ask us — and learn how we improved a convoluted platform for booking ads.
ABOUT THE CLIENT
OneAd is an advertising company providing users with the capability to book various types of advertisements (newspapers, websites, and social networks) from a single place. We were introduced to this client by another Swiss client in the advertising space with whom we have a long-running track record of mobile SDK development and maintenance.
THE CHALLENGE
Imagine you want to sell a car. You might consider posting your advertisement on social media, on Craigslist, or maybe even reaching out to local newspapers. Advertising can be a long and tedious process — especially if you're not a campaign pro, or used to running Facebook Ads. But what if you could book multiple spaces for your ad all at once, with just a couple of clicks? This was our client’s idea. They had even made a functional app, but it was so overcomplicated that users saw no value in the product — and bounce rates were high. Our objective was to redesign the app and create a simple and user-friendly platform for booking online and offline ad spaces.
THE SOLUTION
We had to come up with a simple flow that felt familiar to users, so we chose the online marketplace model, similar to Amazon. That’s how we created OneAd, which is, put simply, “an online store for ads“. It’s a platform for booking ads in Europe, mainly Switzerland.
BOOK AND BUY AD SPACES
Choose from swiss newspapers, news websites, Facebook, and Instagram pages — just browse through the catalog of ad spaces as if you were buying a new coat. Each catalog page contains all the necessary data to help users pick their perfect ad space — circulation, publication schedules, readership, and more.
Customize ads
Different media have their own standards for ads. OneAd makes it easy to customize each ad just as the media specifies by offering templates. You don’t have to read lots of complicated guidelines and create layouts from scratch — just add your own text and images.
Search by location
Let's imagine you want to sell your car in a certain region, city, or neighborhood— you’ll to target a specific audience and post your ads in relevant publications. OneAd allows exactly that. You can browse newspapers and other sources by district, city, municipality, or even postal code.
Product Design
The first version of the app was built without the help of expert designers who know exactly what users need — that’s why users ended up frustrated with the app. We started by completely redesigning the product. Our idea was to create an online marketplace similar to Amazon. The flow looked like this:
1
Search by location or other characteristics
2
Pick a publication
3
Customize your ad
4
Select a publication date on the calendar
5
Add the advertisement to the cart
6
Pay
7
Confirm the payment
Montserrat
36px
34px
28px
24px
20px
18px
16px
14px
12px
Speeding up with Next.js and Tailwind
The app had a huge database —imagine all the Swiss publications that exist, and all the important information about them that the app needs to display. We needed to make sure the app would be stable even when working with so much data. That’s why we used Tailwind and Next.js for the frontend — it helped the app achieve its best performance.
GEO-CODING
Geo-coding was the hardest part of this project. We thoroughly dissected exactly what our client wanted from this feature and implemented complex search mechanics. That’s why our location-based search turned out so great. Our search engine has a fine filter with parameters from regions to zip codes. It even offers a "catchment field" function, which shows the readership of an advertisement in a desired location, so users can make informed choices.
Tech stack
Frontend
Next.js
Tailwind
Backend
NestJS
PostgreSQL
Prisma
Infrastructure
Docker
Kubernetes
Other
Figma
BitBucket
Jira
Confluence
Google Analytics
Maptiler
CLIENT’S REVIEW
Mirko Mikulic
CTO, OneAd GmbH.
Zoftify treated the product as if it was their own, they brought their own ideas as well as improvements over the status quo.
results
According to our client, after we launched our version of the website, they received significantly fewer user complaints. Even better, the new version helped our client drastically increase ad sales.
Working together long-term
OneAd is one of our favorite projects — it’s basically our child! The new and improved platform for booking online and offline ad spaces continues to be awesome and benefits users everyday — but we see room for more improvement. To make OneAd even more useful, we are considering implementing powerful ad analytics. Currently, users don't see in-depth statistics to learn how their ads perform once purchased and published. And, since the platform is designed for amateurs (not marketing professionals), we want to package that data in the form of digestible graphs.
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