How General Mills Improved ROAS with Optimized Bidding by Almost 50%

GMI reported a nearly 50% increase in ROAS after switching their campaigns to optimized bidding

Over the last year, some advertising platforms have lost the ability to connect ads exposure to actual purchases. Instacart Ads, on the other hand, is able to effectively combat these challenges because our platform offers closed-loop measurement and experimentation. These capabilities allow advertisers, like General Mills, to evaluate any combination of features and strategies head-to-head across active advertising campaigns, and understand both improvements in media performance and overall business impact driven by their decisions.

In fact, General Mills was one of the first advertisers to run large-scale, randomized control tests (A/B testing) between their incumbent bidding strategies and Instacart’s new optimized bidding solution. If you’re new to optimized bidding, read the overview of our optimization tools and our best practices for getting the most out of the new features, as this article will look at the recent success General Mills has had running experiments with optimized bidding. 

In working with their Instacart Ads team and Instacart’s Data Science & Media Analytics team, General Mills decided to adopt optimized bidding for select campaigns, which produced impressive results.

In head-to-head A/B tests, General Mills found that their optimized bidding campaigns:

• Earned 7.6% more total sales
• Drove ROAS that was 49.7% higher
• Reached 8% more new-to-brand consumers than their manual bidding campaigns

As a result, GMI is leaning into this new functionality in a meaningful way and adopting optimized bidding across other brands.

What’s next for measurement on Instacart Ads?

We’re excited to provide these robust measurement and experimentation capabilities to advertisers like General Mills. And as we continue to invest in creating value for our advertising partners, our measurement solutions will grow to help advertisers guide decision making, understand the impact of feature adoption, and take their advertising budgets farther.

Based on feedback from advertisers like General Mills, we’re excited to announce that in the future we will be bringing integrated ads experimentation to Instacart Ads Manager and Ads API, allowing advertisers of any size to run seamless experiments to understand which strategies are driving the highest business impact for their brand.  Timing and scope of any product launch is at Instacart’s sole discretion. 

Set up your optimized bidding campaign today by logging into your account in Ads Manager. If you’re not actively advertising with us, you can still get started with optimized bidding. Simply request an account and we’ll be in touch, or you can read more about how other advertisers are seeing success with Instacart’s optimization features. 

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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.