Sponsored Brands bid price update gives way to a sweet victory for Jolly Rancher Brand

In 2025, Jolly Rancher Brand, part of The Hershey Company, wanted to increase visibility for their new Walmart exclusive Jolly Rancher Tropical Gummies.

Their aim was to grow and maintain visibility, improve search performance, and increase sales.

Sweet gains made possible by lower Sponsored Brands floors

Optimize search performance

Jolly Rancher Brand shifted its strategy to focus heavily on search, using Sponsored Brands to help capture high-intent customers and boost visibility on key category terms like “candy.” 

Aim for top placement

The strategy was designed to strengthen brand awareness, drive sales and secure top placement on competitive category keywords for a successful product launch.

Target competitive keywords

As the Sponsored Brands minimum bid price lowered to $0.50, Jolly Rancher Brand began focusing more on competitive keywords to help improve pacing efficiency.

Tactics

Exact-match targeting

The team prioritized exact-match terms such as “candy,” “gummy candy,” and “tropical candy,” while using phrase match to capture complementary long-tail queries.

Trend based bid-adjustment

They balanced performance optimization with upper-funnel visibility goals using Sponsored Brands to help drive both efficiency and awareness. Dynamic bid adjustments were made based on competition and pacing trends, typically in 10–15% increments while increasing bids.

Dayparting

Midway through the campaign, they introduced dayparting by pausing ads during low-traffic hours and resuming them early in the morning. This helped stretch the budget and maintain top-of-search visibility all day.

As a result of optimization done using the Sponsored Brands minimum bid update.

Source: Walmart first-party data, Feb. 19–May 18, 2025 vs. May 19-Aug. 19, 2025. Following the reduction of the Sponsored Brands minimum bid from $1.00 to $0.50, Jolly Rancher Brand achieved the results outlined above.