Driving Improved Campaign Performance and Total Sales with Instacart Ads’ New Optimization Features

Instacart recently unveiled new optimization features, including optimized bidding and bid landscapes, for advertisers leveraging its flagship offering, sponsored product. Sponsored product is a conversion-focused ads offering, which allows brands to secure premium digital shelf space on a cost-per-click basis. Brands can boost sales, increase trial and awareness, drive higher category share and manage campaigns in a self-service portal, Ads Manager. Our new optimization features are designed to provide meaningful value to advertisers through driving greater performance, while offering actionable insights when setting bids for sponsored product campaigns. 

We’re excited to now give advertisers the option to choose between optimized bidding for daily budget campaigns to drive maximized sales, allowing Instacart’s machine learning to manage bids on their behalf, or a manual bidding strategy. Optimized bidding is a new bidding strategy that will help advertisers drive more total sales from their sponsored product campaigns. It also takes the heavy lifting and guesswork out of setting bids manually in Ads Manager. Optimized bidding automatically sets bids for advertisers’ campaigns and adjusts them dynamically by taking into account factors like predicted performance and auction dynamics. 

Boiron, Coleman Natural Foods, and Hometown Food Company (owner of brands like Pillsbury Baking and Hungry Jack) are among the first brand partners to pilot Instacart Ads’ new optimization features. These CPG advertisers have seen massive success, including an increase in total sales, substantial lifts in return on ad spend (ROAS), and significant decreases in cost-per-click.

“We have been working with Instacart for the past seven years and have seen amazing innovation on the platform for the brands. Especially on the AdTech side, there have been a lot of new tools and relevant insights reporting. The newest of these tools, ‘optimized bidding,’ dramatically improved our campaigns’ efficiency and increased performance.”

Sha Atakhanov, Director of Ecommerce & Digital at Boiron

“On top of seeing an increase in category share and more efficiency in our spend, optimized bidding allows our team to set up our campaigns and let Instacart do the work to get our product in front of the right people at the right time without us having to tune the dial.”

Sarah Findle, Director of Marketing, Coleman Natural Foods

“As a platform company with private equity ownership, speed and rate of return are paramount to our success. We felt like we were behind in eCommerce and when we went to prove our investment thesis, we found the fastest way to learn our way through was with Instacart. By being able to control our investment level and target a profitable rate of return, we’ve been able to build credibility and commitment to our investment without having to outlay a large sum upfront and ‘hope’ that it works. We can see our spending working real-time and make adjustments on the fly in-season and post baking season.”

Dan Anglemyer, COO of Hometown Food Company

Also recently launched is a new bid landscape feature within Ads Manager. Bid landscape leverages historical data to offer advertisers actionable insights on the expected impact of changing bids on the performance of their campaigns. For campaigns with manual bidding, bid landscapes offer more transparency and guidance to help advertisers estimate the predicted performance of their ads in different bid scenarios. Advertisers can now review the strength of their bids, a range of estimated spend, estimated impressions, estimated clicks, and estimated sales at different bid amounts.  

Optimized bidding and bid landscape features are available now via Ads Manager to all CPG brands.  

Instacart continues to unveil best-in-class products and tools within Ads Manager to provide increased value and more opportunities for brand partners advertising with us. New features and tools now available include daily budgeting capabilities, product content control via library manager, on-demand business data via customer insights, and our recently unveiled suite of display ads products that enable brands to promote engaging, targeted, creative content to consumers across discovery surfaces.

To learn more about Instacart Ads, please visit: https://ads.instacart.com/

Instacart

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Instacart is the leading grocery technology company in North America, partnering with more than 1,500 national, regional, and local retail banners to deliver from more than 85,000 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.