I designed every ad on Expedia

I started by mapping every place an ad could appear and every kind of advertiser who buys one: hotels, airlines, airports, destinations, car companies, cruise lines and rentals. I worked with ad sales and creative to learn what advertisers ask for, and I studied how travelers move through the pages ads sit on.

The insightTravelers skip anything that looks like a banner, and they stop trusting a page that hides what is paid. An ad works on Expedia when it looks and behaves like Expedia, and says clearly that it is sponsored.

My plan was to design ads as one product family. One anatomy, one set of rules and one Figma system, so every new unit starts from a proven base and ships faster.

I started with the Native Marquee Card, the flagship brand unit under the search box. It was my first ads design, and it became the template for every unit after it.

In Figma I explored many directions for the Marquee, from loud brand layouts to cards that sit inside the page like Expedia’s own content. I cut free-form layouts for each advertiser. They looked bold in a review, but they broke the page and blurred the line between content and ads.

I kept a card that matches Expedia’s content, with one image, a short headline, one link and a fixed Ad label. That anatomy now runs through the whole family below.

I built the Figma ads design system on Expedia’s design and accessibility guidelines, and I tested its documentation and its accessibility before teams relied on it. Each unit was measured on click-through and conversion across lines of business, and the results fed the next round of units.

As the solo designer on ads, I worked directly with PMs and engineers from the first concept to launch. I wrote the rules so ad sales, an advertiser’s agency and an engineer make the same call without waiting on me. They live on the public creative spec site advertisers use today.4

I also designed flows in the advertiser dashboard, so what an advertiser sets up matches what a traveler sees.

One unit I designed brings in $13M+ a year in incremental revenue on its own. Across the family, my units raised click-through and conversion across lines of business.

Expedia Group’s ad revenue grew from $483M in 2023 to $758M in 2025.1 The company reported that its video ads doubled click-through rates, that sponsored listings partners grew 22% to their highest level,2 and that it ended 2025 with a record number of active partners and video ads on the Expedia homepage.3

• Every consumer ad unit in the public catalog. 29 units in 8 families, on Expedia, Hotels.com and Vrbo.
• A Figma ads design system that designers across Expedia reuse.
• The Sponsored Listings redesign, live in lodging and flight results.
• Flows in the advertiser dashboard.

Rules inside the creative tools. The copy and image rules are exact enough to check as advertisers type. Campaigns can launch right the first time, with no review rounds.

Trust measured next to clicks. Pairing click-through with booking and trust signals, so every new unit is judged on what it does for travelers and for advertisers.

What I’d do differently. I would pair trust measures with click-through from the very first unit, instead of adding them once the family was already live. Clicks are easy to count. Trust is what keeps the ads business working.