Redesigning ad placements and lead capture surfaces on CarWale to lift revenue without degrading the buyer's research experience, by treating monetization moments as part of the user journey rather than an interruption to it.
CarWale's revenue comes from two main streams: dealer leads captured through on-site forms, and display advertising monetised through partnerships with car manufacturers and accessory brands. Both had grown organically over years, with new placements layered on top of older ones as new revenue opportunities surfaced and the existing monetization surfaces were rarely retired even when their performance had degraded.
The accumulated effect was a page that buyers experienced as cluttered and that advertisers experienced as underperforming. Heatmaps showed users developing blindness to certain placements, scrolling past them without registering them. Lead form completion rates were respectable on paper but the quality of those leads was dropping, with dealers reporting that an increasing fraction of leads were users who had filled the form reflexively rather than with real intent to buy.
The internal narrative had quietly settled into an unhelpful frame: revenue and user experience were treated as opposing forces, where every monetization surface was a small concession the user experience was making to revenue. That framing produced two failure modes. Design teams resisted revenue work because they saw it as harm reduction. Revenue teams shipped without design oversight because they expected resistance and routed around it. The brief I took on was to dismantle that framing, on the premise that the highest-performing monetization moments are when a buyer is genuinely ready to be served a relevant next step.
I partnered with the revenue team to map every monetization surface on the site against where it sits in the buyer's journey. The exercise required pulling together data from three sources: placement-level performance from the ad ops team, user-level behaviour from session recordings and heatmaps, and dealer feedback on lead quality from the dealer-success team.
The audit revealed three distinct patterns. Some placements were correctly placed but visually wrong, with treatments that were either too loud (causing banner blindness) or too quiet (being missed entirely by users who would have engaged). Some were correctly designed but in the wrong moment, surfacing high-intent CTAs at low-intent points in the journey or vice versa. And some were neither well placed nor well designed, accumulated debris from years of incremental additions that nobody had ever revisited.
The research output was a placement audit matrix that scored each surface on placement appropriateness, visual treatment, and observed performance, with explicit owners and decision dates for each one. This matrix became the steering document for the next two quarters of work, and it shifted the conversation from 'should we add more placements' to 'which existing placements are pulling their weight'.
The redesign treated each placement individually rather than redesigning the page as a unified template. This was the framing shift the team needed, because the previous attempts at improving monetization had always been page-level redesigns that produced compromises across all placements rather than focused wins on specific ones.
Ad slots that appeared mid-research were softened visually. A buyer in the middle of comparing variants is not in a buying-intent moment for accessory advertising, and a loud accessory ad at that moment is a tax on the research experience that produces nothing for the advertiser. Softer visual treatments respected the moment and, counterintuitively, performed better in subsequent measurement because they did not trigger blindness.
Lead capture moments that appeared after a buyer had viewed multiple variants or visited a dealer page were made more prominent and given clearer value propositions. These are high-intent moments where the buyer is genuinely ready for a next step, and the existing design had been weirdly quiet about them. Stronger visual presence and explicit value props turned these into reliable conversion points.
The principle that emerged from the work was simple to state and hard to live by: a monetization surface earns its place by being useful at the moment it appears. If it is not useful at that moment, it does not belong there, regardless of how well it performs in aggregate.
Remove low-performing placements rather than adding new ones. The temptation in revenue work is always to add more surfaces, because every surface looks like a potential revenue gain. The discipline that worked here was the opposite. I argued for removing low-performing placements entirely so the surviving ones could be more prominent. The math was counter-intuitive to the revenue team initially: fewer placements with better conversion outperformed more placements with worse conversion. We built trust through small experiments before committing to broader removals, which took longer than expected but landed with full team buy-in.
Value-first lead forms. The existing lead forms led with the form fields and treated the value proposition as an afterthought. The redesign inverted this: the value prop is the most prominent element, the form fields follow, and the submit button reinforces the value rather than just being a submit button. This was a small change in visual hierarchy that produced a meaningfully different completion experience.
Design ownership of every monetization surface. Monetization surfaces had been quietly drifting away from design ownership for years, mostly because the revenue team was fast and design teams tend to be slow. I argued for reclaiming ownership, which required design to match revenue's velocity to earn that responsibility back. This was as much a cultural change as a process one.
Every new placement requires a journey-moment specification. Going forward, every new monetization surface has to specify its moment on the buyer journey and the user value it provides, before it gets shipped. This single rule changed how new revenue requests came in, because the conversation now starts with 'what is the journey moment' rather than 'where can we fit it'.
Value-first forms in production
The redesigned surfaces produced cleaner leads with higher dealer satisfaction scores, which was the outcome the project had been scoped to produce. Without quoting specific lift numbers, the perceived-clutter measure in our post-research surveys came down to its lowest level in the year preceding the rollout, which was the unexpected outcome that mattered as much as the revenue lift.
The most durable outcome was the framework itself. Every new monetization surface now has to specify its moment on the journey and the user value it provides, before it gets shipped. This rule has held across multiple team transitions since the original work, which is the truest test of whether a framework survives or quietly dies after the original author moves on.
Revenue surfaces had been quietly drifting away from design ownership for years, mostly because the revenue team is fast and design teams can be slow. Reclaiming ownership of these surfaces took persistence and a willingness to ship faster than design teams typically prefer.
The lesson is that any surface a user sees is design's responsibility, regardless of which team owns the revenue line, and design teams have to match revenue's velocity to earn that responsibility back. I would extend this principle into the next year of work by building lightweight design review patterns for revenue surfaces that can run in days rather than weeks, because the team that owns velocity owns the surface.