Optimize Sponsored Product Campaigns
Optimize Sponsored Product campaigns to focus on improving competitiveness, delivery, and performance over time. As campaigns generate data, you can refine bids, targeting, budgets, and product selection to better capture demand and prioritize what's working. Use the guidance below to identify opportunities and make informed adjustments to help improve campaign results.
How to optimize a Sponsored Product campaign
There are three core areas you should focus on when optimizing Sponsored Product campaigns:
Bid adjustments: Control competitiveness in auctions
Budget adjustments: Control how much you spend and how long your ads stay live
Product adjustments: Control what products customers see and what drives performance
Bid adjustments
DoorDash uses a second-price auction for Sponsored Product campaigns. Evaluating your bid vs. your cost-per-click (CPC) can help you decide whether to raise or lower your bid to achieve different goals.
If you want to influence impressions scale or conversion rate, you can test increasing your bids to become more competitive within auctions.
Targeting: For Sponsored Products, you can use advanced targeting features, such as keyword targeting with custom bidding, to adjust bids toward top-performing terms and negate low-performing ones
Ad Groups: You can organize your ad groups and adjust bids for each to tailor results at a more granular level
Auto-bidding: For hands-free bidding, leverage Auto-bidding to automatically optimize bids toward the opportunities most likely to drive attributed sales. Set a minimum ROAS to scale spend while maintaining your efficiency goals.
We recommend reviewing your bids regularly to ensure they remain competitive within DoorDash's rapidly growing ads ecosystem.
Budget adjustments
Ensuring the budget is sufficient to stay live for as long as possible each day to capture maximum potential for ad-attributed sales.
For campaigns using daily budgets:
Ensure your daily budget is sufficient by checking the Time of Day cap-out data on the campaign dashboard. If your campaign is consistently running out of budget early, you may be missing high-intent traffic later in the day. Adjusting your daily budget based on the recommended daily budgets provided can help maintain consistent delivery.
Optimized pacing can automatically adjust daily spend throughout the week based on consumer traffic patterns. This feature increases spend on higher-traffic days and reduces it on lower-traffic days, typically keeping daily spend within a range of approximately 0.6x to 2x of your set daily budget. This allows you to capture more sales opportunities without increasing your total campaign budget. In order to maintain control over overall spend, we recommend applying a Total Campaign Budget.
For campaigns using lifetime budgets:
It's important to ensure that the total budget is sufficient for the full campaign duration. Depleting the budget too early can stop delivery before your intended end date, limiting overall performance.
Product adjustments
Ensuring the right product mix is key for Sponsored Products. As DoorDash is a marketplace of retailers and only surfaces in-stock items at a given retailer location, it’s critical to ensure a sufficient volume of advertised products to account for in-store distribution variances and out-of-stocks.
Product best practices: Start your campaigns with broad SKU coverage. As you get a better read of performance by SKU, you can then optimize by refining the SKU selection and bids based on performance results. For Custom Bidding campaigns, we recommend grouping Ad Groups by Average Selling Price so you can set bids that align with your products' price points and typical basket sizes.
Reports: Reviewing the product performance report will enable you to make more informed decisions about which products are driving results and how to organize product ad groups and their respective bids to reach your goals.
By consistently reviewing performance and making targeted adjustments, you can build more efficient campaigns that scale with demand and drive stronger campaign results over time.
What to do next
Understand how your Sponsored Product ads show up
Learn how to see your campaign performance
