Building Lyft’s Marketing Automation Platform

We take pride in our mission to improve people’s lives with the world’s best transportation. More than 50 million carbon neutral Lyft rides happen every month across the US and Canada—and we’ve barely scratched the surface in the potential for rideshare. Part of our growth is improvements in our acquisition process—like launching region-specific ad campaigns that increase awareness, and consideration of our multi-modal offerings.

Coordinating these campaigns to acquire new users at scale has become time-consuming, leading us to take on the challenge of automation. Acquisition is typically led by a data-driven cross-functional team that focuses on scale, measurability, and predictability. You may have seen Lyft ads like these: Acquisition operates at the top and largest part of the onboarding funnel, through the various channels listed on the left.

No two channels are created equal: we work with different partners, technologies, and strategies to make sure that Lyft is the top choice for consumers. Other teams at Lyft focus on different parts of the user journey to provide a world-class experience. A high-level view is shown below.

Acquiring users at scale means making thousands of decisions each day, for each region where Lyft operates: choosing bids, budgets, creatives, incentives, and audiences; running tests; and more. Just keeping up with these repeated tasks occupies a great deal of marketers’ mindshare and can lead to suboptimal decisions. It’s expensive to the business and does not scale.

Source: lyft.com