DoorDash revealed on Wednesday that it had acquired Symbiosys, a retail search ad firm that was founded two years prior. $175 million is the deal price.
The food delivery business also said that its ad revenue over the last 12 months has now topped $1 billion.
For DoorDash, Symbiosys is a suitable acquisition. Since its inception, the food delivery platform, along with other online merchants like Best Buy and Chewy, has been a cornerstone client of Symbiosys.
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Prior to founding Symbiosis, Bashar Kachachi served as Google Search Ads 360’s director of product management.
The founders of Flywheel Digital, a retail advertising business that Omnicom purchased in 2023, and HookLogic, a sponsored listings startup that sold to Criteo in 2016, are also among the startup’s original investors. As a result, Kachachi and his group are well aware of the unique search-related difficulties that merchants and brands confront.
A grocery store brand would want to control a Google search for frozen waffles, for instance, but brands are not permitted to send customers to a third-party website. Therefore, Eggo is unable to send that traffic to local chains like Walmart, Kroger, or others where customers can buy its goods.
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By using what it refers to as “collaborative bidding,” Symbiosys circumvents this.
To receive the first-party benefits, retail media advertisers must navigate the retailer’s system. The capacity to increase traffic to the retailer’s website is just as important as closed-loop purchase attribution, as Google results prioritize websites with higher traffic and transaction volume (e.g., Walmart.com against LeggoMyEggo.com).
However, the “collaborative” component goes beyond simply using the retailer’s Google Ad account seat to spend brand ad expenditures. The same grocery traffic is frequently sought after by retailers themselves.
For example, Kroger may have statistics indicating that consumers are more likely to fill and buy a full cart of groceries right away if they begin with a frozen item, such as Eggo waffles. Eggo may not desire that search keyword as much as Kroger does. The Symbiosys platform enables both the brand and the store to allocate a certain amount of funds for the bid in order to increase the search odds for both.
For instance, a customer ordering from a nearby restaurant would be asked to add a drink to their order. If so, it’s possible that the item isn’t even coming from the restaurant where the customer is placing their order. It might be picked up at another nearby establishment, such as 7-11, by the DoorDash delivery person.
The restaurant and the 7-11 are two of the real-world businesses that contribute to the order in that scenario; Pepsi might also be trying to be the selected cola.
Additionally, DoorDash’s advertising capabilities will be expanded by Symbiosys to additional off-site or other walled garden platforms. The firm was created mostly for Google Search, but it also uses social media sites like Meta and TikTok, as well as other retail search engines like Amazon.
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