News & New Releases: Optimization Tools for Ad Campaigns 

In our News & New Releases series we’ll be sharing information about product releases and new features built by the Instacart Ads team, as well as any news that might be of interest to our brand partners. 

In this article we take a look at a couple of new optimization features for our sponsored product ads product — optimized bidding and bid landscapes. These features were designed to drive greater performance and transparency when it comes to setting bids for sponsored product ad placements. 

Getting started with optimized bidding

Optimized bidding is a new feature which automatically sets bids for your ads and dynamically adjusts them throughout the day. Taking into account many factors, our advanced algorithm automatically determines the optimal bidding strategy to generate the largest-possible expected sales revenue your budget can afford. 

Optimized bidding eliminates the need for manual campaign management. It also means there’s no need to find your top keywords and bid separately — everything is automated. 

This functionality was designed for advertisers who are looking for a result-driven option when running ad campaigns and prefer the ‘low touch’ approach automation provides over manually setting and maintaining bids. 

We’ve released optimized bidding as a new bidding setting for daily budget campaigns. Getting started is relatively straightforward — when you’re creating a new daily budget campaign or editing an existing one, all you need to do is select the new Optimized option under Bidding settings. 

Optionally, you can also Set a minimum ROAS goal and provide a goal for the minimum return on ad spend (ROAS) you’d like your ad campaign to have. 

When you choose to set a minimum ROAS goal, you’re telling us the minimum return on ad spend you’re willing to accept, while we will always optimize your campaign for the best ROAS possible. 

Getting started with bid landscapes

Additionally, for manual campaigns we’re launching an optimization enhancement called bid landscapes which helps you to estimate the predicted performance of your ads in different bid scenarios. With this new functionality, you can review the bid strength, a range of estimated spend, estimated impressions, estimated clicks, and estimated sales at different bid amounts.

Reviewing your bid landscapes

You can start using bid landscapes for manual daily budget campaigns in Ads Manager to review estimates for spend, clicks, impressions, and sales, based on different bid scenarios. Bid landscapes are displayed in Ads Manager in the Default Maximum CPC Bid section, just beneath the analytics graph. 

Bid landscapes leverage Instacart historical data to estimate the impact of changing bids has on the performance of your ads, providing increased transparency and more data points to consider when planning your bid strategies. 

What’s next?

We continue to enhance our ads products and the self-service tool to manage them, Ads Manager, to provide increased value and more opportunities for brand partners advertising with us. These new features are just the latest in a series of planned product updates that are now ready for you to use. 

We’ve also published a quick video tutorial on setting up campaigns, including optimized bidding campaigns; you can watch that here. 

Please reach out to your Instacart Ads representative with any questions — and if you’re not already advertising with us, sign up here. 

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.