Estimate daily active usage of Ads in a priority market

Problem Statement Description

Product context: DoorDash is a local commerce and delivery platform; its products include restaurant delivery, DashPass, grocery and retail delivery, merchant tools, and dasher tools.

DoorDash wants to understand the daily active usage of its Ads product in a priority suburban market. In this context, Ads may include sponsored restaurant placements, promoted grocery or convenience merchants, sponsored search results, or other paid discovery surfaces within the DoorDash consumer experience.

Your task is to estimate how many users actively encounter or engage with Ads on a typical day in that market. You should define what “daily active usage of Ads” means, clarify whether you are estimating ad impressions, unique users exposed to ads, users who click ads, or users who place orders influenced by ads, and then build a reasonable market-sizing approach.

This is a guesstimate exercise, so the focus is not on knowing DoorDash’s internal numbers. The interviewer is looking for a structured estimation method, clear assumptions, and thoughtful handling of suburban marketplace dynamics such as order frequency, restaurant density, grocery usage, commuter behavior, merchant ad adoption, and competition from Uber Eats, Instacart, Walmart, Amazon, and local delivery options.

The estimate should consider:

- The geographic scope of the “priority market” and whether it represents a city, metro area, county, or suburban cluster

- The relevant population base, including households, adults, app users, or active DoorDash customers

- How often suburban users open DoorDash and place orders across restaurants, grocery, convenience, and retail

- The share of sessions or order journeys where ad surfaces are available and visible

- The distinction between ad exposure, ad clicks, ad-influenced orders, and merchant-side advertiser activity

- Assumptions around merchant participation, sponsored placement inventory, and category mix

- Sensitivity drivers such as weekends vs weekdays, meal periods, seasonality, promotions, and local competition

- Sanity checks against marketplace balance, merchant ROI, delivery reliability, Dasher supply, and unit economics

Your goal is to produce a defensible daily estimate with a transparent calculation path, clearly stated assumptions, and a way to test whether the result is directionally reasonable for DoorDash’s Ads business in a suburban priority market.