Optimize Sponsored Brand Campaigns
Once you've launched your Sponsored Brand campaign, ongoing optimization helps improve performance, increase efficiency, and keep your campaigns aligned with your goals.
How to optimize your Sponsored Brand campaign
As you set up your Sponsored Brand campaign, there are a few ways to get the most out of it.
Bid adjustment
Bids are one of the most direct ways to impact campaign performance.
DoorDash uses a second-price auction for Sponsored Brand 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.
Monitor your budget
Budget plays a key role in how often your campaign is eligible to serve. If your budget is too low, your campaign may stop serving before peak traffic periods, limiting performance.
Watch budget-cap data for Daily Budgets and balances for Lifetime Budgets on your dashboard. Your budget should be sufficient to keep your campaign live for as long as possible each day so you can capture the maximum opportunity for ad-attributed sales.
If you're using a daily budget, regularly check whether your campaign is capping too early and use the recommended daily budget guidance in Ads Manager. If you're using a lifetime budget, make sure it's sufficient for your planned campaign dates so the campaign doesn't stop delivering too soon.
Ensure product mix is working
The products included in your Sponsored Brand campaign directly impact whether your ad can serve and how it performs. Sponsored Brand campaigns need at least three items to surface on mobile and at least four to show up on desktop web, so be sure to choose a wide variety of products to account for variances in inventory and out-of-stocks. Pin your top items strategically to ensure these items continually surface first in the ad unit. DoorDash only surfaces products that are in stock at a given retailer location.
Review product performance regularly to identify which items are driving results and update your campaign accordingly. It's best to start with broad product coverage, then refine your product selection based on performance.
Campaign changes best practices
Certain changes to an active campaign may require it to be reviewed again before it can resume serving. If a campaign re-enters moderation, it will temporarily stop serving until the review is complete.
Examples of changes that may trigger re-moderation include:
Adding or removing featured products
Updating your brand logo or creative
Changing campaign start or end dates
Editing the campaign title
To help avoid interruptions, we recommend making changes that trigger re-moderation outside of peak campaign periods. For example, if you make changes on a Friday evening, your campaign may not be reviewed until the next business day, which could pause delivery over the weekend.
Understand Brand Halo metrics
Brand Halo metrics help you evaluate the full impact of your Sponsored Brand campaigns beyond the product that was initially clicked. Instead of measuring performance at the individual item level, these metrics show how your ads drive sales, orders, and engagement across your broader product portfolio.
Use Brand Halo metrics to understand how campaigns influence overall brand performance, including repeat purchases, cross-product discovery, and new customer acquisition. This is especially useful when running campaigns with multiple products or when your goal is to grow total brand sales rather than a single SKU.
Learn more about key Brand Halo metric definitions.
Use reporting to help optimize your campaign
Ads Manager provides performance insights like Marketing and Business reports that help you understand how your campaigns are performing across key metrics.
These insights can help you identify:
Which campaigns are driving results
Where performance is improving or declining
Opportunities to adjust strategy
What to do next
Learn how to see your Sponsored Brand campaign performance
