DoorDash Ads is upping its bid to advertisers with a brand new suite of solutions for consumer packaged goods (CPG) brands and enterprise restaurants, including expanded ad products and enhanced measurement tools. The offerings, unveiled during Advertising Week New York, are supposed to help brands drive reach and are a signal of how the platform is attempting to supply greater transparency into ad performance.
The platform unveiled enhanced measurement tools for enterprise restaurants, including a brand new measurement standard for Sponsored Listings called Ghost Ads that guarantees advertisers’ tests only include customers who actually saw an ad — or would have — to deliver a more accurate read on performance. In eight recent tests, Ghost Ads reduced measurement noise by over 90%, in accordance with release details.
DoorDash also revealed latest reporting in Ads Manager that gives advertisers a single view of ads and performance with metrics including average order value, orders and total sales.The platform also debuted latest reporting and discovery tools for CPG brands, including the integration of Sponsored Products across all categories of worldwide search in the U.S. and internationally, a move that might help brands reach more high-intent audiences.
Additionally, category-level share reporting powered by Circana is designed to supply advertisers a transparent view of how they perform in comparison with competitors on DoorDash. Together, the suite of latest solutions are designed to fill gaps for advertisers while still prioritizing the consumer experience, said Peter Giordano, general manager of DoorDash Ads’ platform and growth services.
“The throughline for us is consistently, what are we hearing from our advertisers for a necessity that we will solve, and the way can we be sure that the need also concurrently delivers an incremental consumer value,” Giordano said.
Marketing Dive met with Giordano at Advertising Week New York to debate DoorDash’s latest ad products, the way forward for the platform and the state of retail media networks broadly.
The following interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.
MARKETING DIVE: What is the ultimate goal behind DoorDash’s latest ad products?
PETER GIORDANO: The goal — every goal we now have — is rooted in a merchant problem that we will solve after which a consumer need that we will deliver. So in case you take into consideration a few of the latest things we released, for instance, ads in global search: [there’s a] critical advertiser need to indicate up regardless of where customers are starting their journey whether it’s global search, whether it’s actually in a store page, we would like to be sure that brands have the opportunity to have interaction with our customers at any time when and wherever that discovery journey starts.
Can you expand on the way you wed together advertisers’ needs with an optimal consumer experience?
We are a maniacally consumer-first company. Protecting the consumer experience is something we take very seriously. For example, one decision we made as an ads business was for our principal restaurant ads product, which known as Sponsored Listings, for restaurants to advertise in the DoorDash app — we only charge them if it results in an order. They don’t pay for impressions, they don’t pay for clicks. They only pay for an order.
That’s really advertiser friendly since it derisks the proposition for them, nevertheless it also makes a significantly better consumer experience, because we now have every incentive to be sure the best and most relevant ad is being served to you, because in case you don’t think it’s relevant and also you don’t act on it, the ads business makes no money. That decision holds us accountable to also delivering the best, relevant experience for consumers.
Standardization continues to be a chief grievance against retail media networks. How are you helping address that?
We have three different customer segments: enterprise restaurants, CPG brands after which our SMB restaurants — type of the single location, mom and pops. All three of those customer segments have different needs, different levels of sophistication, different ad products which are relevant to them. As a result, we now have three different entry points. We have a special ads manager for every of those segments, because it might be super overwhelming for a SMB restaurant to log into an ads manager that has all the bells and whistles that McDonald’s needs and vice versa.
All of our releases and every part we do is thru one single serve ads manager that’s relevant to that audience. So category share reporting is accessible in the same ads manager where they will launch ads in global search, for instance, and where they will leverage our AI products and insights to make their next campaign higher. We’re just attempting to be sure that we now have a single entry point for all of our advertisers that’s very hyper relevant to them, and as much as we will, takes the guesswork out of the equation.
DoorDash recently acquired Symbiosys. How is that partnership going to this point?
For the higher a part of near two years, we were working with them just as a partner — it was almost to the point that I kind of forgot they weren’t employees because they were just great partners of ours. So in that sense, it was a really natural and seamless integration from a people and culture perspective because we’ve been working with them so closely as one in every of their first large customers, after which we’ve done numerous work over the past couple of months to integrate their team in with the broader DoorDash Ads team.
I feel two exciting things have come from it. One, we’re working so closely and in lockstep with them to proceed to construct our offsite ads business — we’re not just for CPG brands, but now an offering for SMB restaurants that they’ve been constructing a product for us that’s bespoke for SMB restaurants.
Separately, they’re still working with other retailers as their customers. This acquisition didn’t mean that they will’t work with other retailers as well because that’s their core platform, and numerous those retailers that they’re working with are also retailers on the DoorDash marketplace. There’s numerous opportunity for synergy now with Symbiosys working with those retailers, us working with those retailers, after which collectively determining how can all of us make one another higher.
When we take into consideration offsite retail media, what are the pain points? Where does it must go?
One really exciting area where offsite can proceed to go is to be more of a creative storytelling vehicle for retail media. In the early days of retail media, it was sponsored search ads, and it was a highly effective conversion tactic, but a brand couldn’t exactly tell their story through that media. Now, with offsite, brands will be across search, social, programmatic, online video, CTV, there’s so many places that they will tell their story powered by a retailer’s first-party data.
One of the challenges is just ensuring we will accurately connect the dots from a measurement perspective across all of those disparate channels — nobody has the solution to that today. We’re all working on it. I feel the entire industry is kind of sharing learnings of how we will match data, how we will follow a path to buy, how we will understand what different points along that path to buy perhaps tipped the scales. We’re not there yet, but we want to get there because brands want to grasp what was truly top-of-the-funnel awareness, what began moving someone mid-funnel, what actually got them over the line.
Where is DoorDash Ads headed longterm?
DoorDash and Wolt and Deliveroo are all one company across 40 countries. So one, where we’re going is to be a very global ads business, unify our offerings, work collectively across our teams and produce DoorDash Ads to 40 countries. So that may be a huge exciting path for us now that not only is Wolt Ads up and running but the Deliveroo acquisition went through.
Secondly, we’re leveraging numerous opportunities with AI to personalize the experience for our consumers, and by definition, provide higher outcomes for our advertisers. The more we will use technology and AI to take the guesswork out of the equation for our advertisers and just allow us to kind of optimize across ads and promotions, across on-site ads and offsite ads across different ad types, different promotion constructs, based on what we expect different customer segments can be most receptive to, that’s something that’s really exciting.
[That’s] where we see the way forward for DoorDash ads going: leveraging our technology and AI through what we’re calling Smart Campaigns to be sure that we’re truly automating and intelligently serving ads to the right customer at the right time.
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