Find out how your ad campaigns overlap with eachother and with organic reach.
In today's hyper-competitive market, understanding the real impact of your advertising spend is crucial to maximizing profitability. At Screenlake, we specialize in helping brands like Doritos measure ad incrementality—the true value of their advertising efforts across different platforms. Our unique approach uses 24/7 data capture from real smartphones worldwide, tracking when and where a brand appears on-screen across any app or digital space. This gives brands insights into three critical areas: people who saw their ads on one platform (e.g., Google), people reached by ads on other platforms, and those who encountered the product organically.
By analyzing the overlap between these groups, companies can understand how many people they are paying to advertise to who already know about their product, and how many are being introduced to the product for the first time. This knowledge is invaluable for refining marketing strategies, optimizing ad spend, and ultimately driving greater ROI.
For instance, knowing that a large portion of your audience is encountering your product both through paid ads and organic mentions could suggest the need to reallocate funds or focus on new audience segments. Conversely, identifying people only exposed to your product via paid ads on one platform—without any organic reach—can help you determine where your efforts are generating new interest.
Here, we focus in on the case of Doritos, a tremendously popular American consumer brand with a dedicated following and a strong advertising initiative. What follows is a first-of-its kind analysis.
Foremost, we measure that 90% of Doritos’ reach is via organic engagement. This includes individuals texting about Doritos, looking through products on an app, seeing a tweet about Doritos, engaging in an AI chat about Doritos, and any other non-promoted exposure. Clearly, Doritos has a massive and excited core demo (which Screenlake can scale through our brand intelligence product).
Looking at ad spend: Doritos places a great deal of mobile-first advertisement via Google platforms, including Google Ads, YouTube, and Google Search (shown in teal). Interestingly, less than a third of ads placed by Doritos through Google Ads platforms reached individuals who weren't already organically exposed to Doritos on-screen, in the same time period. Depending on the growth marketing goals, this could be a great finding or a revelation. Reaching individuals outside of the already-engaged audience is a primary goal when expanding market size. Alternatively, inspiring repeat purchases from known customers has direct and fast impact on the bottom line. Ensuring that the incrementality outcomes of ad pushes match the intended goal of ad campaigns (and their creatives) is an art, but Screenlake's measures can turn it into a science.
What makes Screenlake unique is that we provide these insights through real behavioral observation, not estimates. Unlike traditional methods that rely on self-reported data or incomplete metrics, we track thousands of brands and subbrands in real time, enabling our clients to see the full picture of their brand presence and sentiment across digital spaces.
Less than 5% of the audience that was incrementally reached via Google Ads were also reached by other platforms' ads. As with incrementality against organic exposure, this cross-platform ad duplication can be a success or a failure depending on campaign goals. Where repeat-exposures are desired in order to boost the likelihood of purchase conversion, 5% is a surprisingly low overlap value. If, however, these ad exposures follow from a push to reach as broad an audience at possible, then this single-digit overlap percentage indicates that Doritos' marketing leads have their finger on the pulse.
In short, anyone who has a consumer brand, and spends money to promote it. As Screenlake is already tracking thousands of brands and products, your brand is likely already analyzed. We offer competitive intelligence as well, meaning that your team can evaluate ad spend and organic brand love of any company as part of market research and company due diligence.
While Doritos was used as an illustrative example in the accompanying graphic, Screenlake has not conducted this specific analysis for them. However, our platform continually monitors thousands of brands to deliver similarly actionable insights.
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