Become a staple in the cookbook and the cart with recipes

Inspire out-of-aisle purchases with new ad format

Instacart aims to help consumers discover new products and brands as they shop online from their favorite retailers. To help our brand partners drive more discoverability, we announced a new suite of inspiration ads to help drive out-of–aisle discovery.  

After a successful pilot phase, recipes are now in open beta.

Recipes lets brands merchandise products alongside complementary items to complete a dish and spark inspiration in untapped moments. For example, when a consumer is searching for spinach they might see a recipe ad for vegetarian lasagna featuring the spinach that was already on their mind. By leveraging recipes, brands are able to extend their reach across aisles and win on searches they normally wouldn’t show up in. During the pilot phase, recipes campaigns had over 35% NTB sales and 70% out-of-aisle impressions^*. By merchandising with products beyond their own portfolio, recipes help spark relevant inspiration while consumers are browsing for items on their shopping lists.

How recipes work to promote your products

Imagine a consumer browsing for tomato sauce. They discover a mouth-watering Weeknight Bolognese recipe featuring your brand’s product as the hero ingredient. Although your product wasn’t on their shopping list, the completed dish looks irresistible. They tap to explore.

Instantly, they’re taken to a detailed recipe page with:

• Step-by-step instructions
• Prep time and cooking details
• Portioned ingredient list

With one tap, they add all ingredients to their cart and save the recipe in their digital cookbook for future meal ideas. 

Creating your recipe landing page 

To leverage this new ad format, brands need to first create their recipe landing page in Ads Manager. Recipe landing pages are what consumers see when they click on your ad and they display all the things you’d expect to see on a recipe — description, ingredients, and prep and cooking instructions. You can also provide optional information like prep time and number of servings. 

We’ve built a new Recipes page in Ads Manager for brands to set up their recipe landing pages. You’ll need to fill out the form with your recipe’s information, provide an image of the completed dish and the logo you want displayed on the recipe. The key step is selecting the ingredients for your recipe— 

When you’re adding ingredients, you’ll add both sponsored ingredients and non-sponsored ingredients.  

Sponsored ingredients are the specific UPCs you want to advertise with your recipe ad. So that could be the ricotta cheese in the vegetable lasagna recipe example. Or the pasta and olive oil in the bolognese recipe. You need at least one sponsored ingredient but can add up to three. 

Recipe ads can win impressions and be displayed to consumers as long as at least one sponsored ingredient is available at the store the consumer is shopping from. So it’s a good idea to include three sponsored ingredients to increase the chances of your ad serving. You can select brands from your portfolio or partner with other brands to bring a recipe to life! 

While sponsored ingredients are specific UPCs, the remaining non-sponsored ingredients are generic. So in our vegetable lasagna recipe, this could be the spinach, lasagna noodles, olive oil, and garlic that completes the recipe. When you’re adding non-sponsored ingredients, you specify just the generic name of the ingredient, not a UPC. As consumers shop your recipe, Instacart suggests specific products that are in-stock that match these ingredients. You can select up to 40 non-sponsored ingredients in your recipe. 

Setting up your campaign

Once you’ve created your recipe landing page, you can set up a recipe ad campaign in Ads Manager similar to other display and shoppable ads which redirect to a landing page. You’ll define your budget, pacing, CPM bid, and set up your targeting. 

Recipe ads support both keyword and behavioral targeting. For optimal reach and engagement, we recommend keyword targeting with broad match. When you use broad match, our algorithms expand your keyword list to reach people who search for related keywords. This extends your reach and connects you with new and existing consumers in untapped moments. 

Build brand love on Instacart

With recipes, you can inspire consumers to try your product, surfacing in new moments and aisles to reach consumers browsing for complementary products. Beyond that, you can build brand awareness and drive content engagement with recipes, becoming a trusted resource for families as they prepare their weekly meal plan. 

Speak with your Instacart representative and get started with recipes today. 

*% out of aisle impressions: represents the portion of the total impressions on search that were related to the non-sponsored ingredients in the recipe (and not related to the sponsored ingredient). This metric is not available in Ads Manager. 

Performance is reported at an aggregate level across campaigns during the pilot duration (6/16/24-7/18/24). This provides no guarantee of future results. Individual campaign outcomes may vary due to factors beyond our control.

Instacart

Author

Instacart is the leading grocery technology company in North America, partnering with more than 1,400 national, regional, and local retail banners to deliver from more than 80,000 stores across more than 14,000 cities in North America. To read more Instacart posts, you can browse the company blog or search by keyword using the search bar at the top of the page.