PepsiCo unlocks over 80% new-to-brand ROAS with Skai capabilities for Amazon DSP
About PepsiCo
PepsiCo products are enjoyed by consumers more than one billion times a day in more than 200 countries and territories around the world. PepsiCo performance is driven by a complementary beverage and convenient foods portfolio that includes Brands like Lay’s, Doritos, Cheetos, Gatorade, Pepsi-Cola, Mountain Dew, Quaker, and SodaStream. PepsiCo’s product portfolio includes a wide range of enjoyable foods and beverages, including many iconic brands.
For more information, visit www.PepsiCo.com.
Challenge
For a large, established brand like PepsiCo, finding and converting shoppers that are new to the brand is not an easy task. Audience-centric media buying and analysis is a key component of its marketing strategy to improve market penetration.
A key component in PepsiCo’s omnichannel approach is leveraging Amazon DSP, offering brands unique reach and audience insights. Like many consumer brands embracing full-funnel retail media, PepsiCo’s commerce marketing team felt increasing pressure to understand how specific tactical adjustments and campaign optimizations could drive incremental sales.
Unfortunately, making strategic adjustments to Amazon DSP campaigns at scale can be a significant challenge due to the high volume of campaigns supporting across multiple brands and categories. Additionally, functional limitations within the Amazon DSP console meant that adjusting campaigns at scale was still a largely manual process that made audience optimization quite cumbersome.
PepsiCo’s Amazon marketing team continues to have ambitious growth goals which requires marketing tactics to work as efficiently as possible. The efficiency of marketing campaigns starts with the audience. Without a native solution in Amazon DSP built for the size and scale of PepsiCo, testing audience optimizations quickly limited PepsiCo’s agility in reaching the right consumers most likely to buy in near real time.
Solution
PepsiCo partnered with Skai on a test-and-learn approach to move faster and to understand two critical business questions:
- Would increasing bids for top DSP audience segments boost the overall purchase rate?
- Could increasing bids for these segments help expand market penetration?
Precision targeting of in-market segments was a priority for the team. Skai offers a strong suite of capabilities that help PepsiCo optimize Amazon DSP campaigns, including Audience Segment Bid Modifiers. This powerful new feature enabled the marketing team to automatically increase bids above the average CPM for target in-market audience segments.
With more control and flexibility, the team fine-tuned bids—raising them for high-performing audiences and lowering them for weaker ones—to boost ROI. This streamlined workflows, made scaling easier, and allowed PepsiCo to adjust campaigns in real time, ensuring the brand reached the right audiences at the right moment.
Results
Following the successful rollout of the test in Skai, PepsiCo saw an immediate improvement in new-to-brand ROAS. The sustained NTB ROAS lift during the testing period validated PepsiCo’s audience-centric strategy to increase new-to-brand purchases which adds incremental sales. The team sees the potential to further improve workflow efficiency and improve Amazon DSP campaign performance using this approach for other categories.
- Over 80% increase in NTB ROAS
- 20-30% revenue increase
- 20-30% increase in ROI
- 20-30% decrease in Cost Per Unit Sold
Solution Used
