Papa Johns Boosts Pizza Orders with Interest Targeting

Interest Targeting finds customers ready to order

Designed to help advertisers drive growth, Interest Targeting lets restaurants reach consumers based on their dish preferences and past ordering behavior. For their Sponsored Listing and Promotion campaigns, advertisers can target audiences based on their affinity to certain dishes. Restaurants can also combine Interest Targeting with other targeting options, like All, New, DashPass, and time of day for more-specific targeting.

Already one of the most sophisticated advertisers with DoorDash Ads & Promos, Papa Johns decided to test out Interest Targeting, layering it on Sponsored Listings to drive more orders on the platform.

Delivering pizza with a side of innovation

From its inception, Papa Johns has innovated in its ongoing quest to deliver an ever-better pizza and a superior customer experience. Early on, the brand recognized the consumer shift to ordering food through delivery apps, and was a first-mover in the QSR pizza category – joining the DoorDash marketplace in 2019. 

Partnering with DoorDash gave Papa Johns the digital channel growth they wanted — and a new partner for innovation. Focusing on advertising and promotions, they began regularly running Sponsored Listings, occasionally pairing them with limited time offers. 

“We appreciate all the cool new ways to slice and dice customer cohorts. DoorDash has a wealth of actionable data, which lets us get really fine-tuned with our targeting.” - Andrew Garfrerick, Senior Director of Channel Strategy, Papa Johns

Serving up more engagement and sales — and a bigger slice of the category

Intent on greater incrementality, Papa Johns’ delivery growth team, led by Andrew Garfrerick, Senior Director of Channel Strategy, recently decided to experiment and be first-to-market with Interest Targeting. The pilot, which ran an Interest Targeting campaign against a control, was successful, driving more orders than baseline. Testing resulted in a +4% customer lift and +3.9% sales lift in pizza orders, demonstrating how affinity for a targeted dish translates into sales of that dish. In the hyper-competitive pizza category, Interest Targeting also yielded a 3.2% gain in share for Papa Johns, opening the door to further investment to help accelerate category-share growth.

Moving forward with the DoorDash Ads team, Garfrerick wants to experiment with other use cases and ensure that Papa Johns continues to be a QSR leader in structured testing and digital innovation. If, for example, the company decides to explore a new food category, Interest Targeting could help Papa Johns reach customers beyond their pizza fanbase — and even new-to-brand customers as well.

Here’s Papa Johns results* at a glance:

“Interest Targeting was super efficient in generating incremental transactions from a target cohort. It's a locator for high-intent purchasers. - Andrew Garfrerick, Senior Director of Channel Strategy, Papa Johns

Learn more about Interest Targeting for Sponsored Listing campaigns.

* Customer lift and sales lift in pizza orders numbers are measured by comparing high-interest cohort not exposed to ads vs. those exposed to ads. Category share growth numbers are reported by comparing pre-campaign vs. post-campaign period.