Securing your place on the digital shelf

The latest best practices to maximize your sales on Instacart with sponsored product ads

Millions of consumers shop for groceries online from their favorite retailers using Instacart. As they shop, browse and search, Instacart displays relevant products available at the retailer they’re shopping from, including product placements from sponsored product ad campaigns. 

While the digital shelf is essentially endless, the premium space on it is on the top rows of products consumers see. That’s because consumers typically buy products from these rows. In fact, the top three placements for sponsored product ads make up nearly 70% of all sponsored product clicks.¹ Winning these premium placements can drive great results for brands. 

Get the most out of your ad spend

Not all sponsored product ad campaigns are created equal. The most successful campaigns take advantage of the enhanced features of sponsored product ads and couple the campaign goals with the campaign setup. 

We are continuously investing in innovations to improve sponsored product ads to better capture sales across all stages of the shopping journey from new and existing customers. Some of the latest sponsored product ad enhancements you should consider when optimizing your sponsored product ad campaigns on Instacart include: 

• New-to-brand optimized bidding. Because acquiring new consumers and growing your active consumer base is a top priority for many brands, we launched new-to-brand (“NTB”) optimized bidding earlier this year and have invested in enhancements to help fully deliver your business goals. Using this objective advertisers can optimize their bids to reach consumers who have not bought their brand on Instacart within the last 26 weeks. When Honey Stinger ran an ad campaign optimized for NTB customers, of the campaign’s attributed sales, 65% were NTB customers on Instacart, showing how effective this new bidding option can be.^* 
• Increased control with target ROAS. To empower advertisers with more control over how their sponsored product ad campaigns optimize bids, we launched target ROAS for optimized bidding campaigns. This provides predictable campaign performance as the bidding algorithm takes into account market conditions over the previous 30 days to continuously learn and deliver the specified ROAS.

Choose your controls in the campaign setup

Brands just like yours are winning on Instacart and accomplishing their objectives. There are many factors that contribute to your ad campaign performance, including your budget, existing share of sales, which categories you are in, among many more, which you should consider when defining your strategy and tactics. But one key decision you have to make during campaign setup is how you want to control your ad campaign.

Why is control so important to success?

Because of the many variables involved in sponsored product ad campaigns, a campaign can achieve objectives like hitting a certain ROAS or reaching an amount of attributed sales, but do so in a way that’s less than ideal. That might mean spending your budget faster than you anticipated. Or maybe the campaign went dark to preserve budget only to leave potential sales on the table. 

When deciding how you want to control your campaign, your first decision is whether to go with optimized bidding or manual bidding. 

These two options define the bidding strategy for your campaign. One key consideration is whether you want control over cost or control over performance.  

If you want to control the cost of your campaign, manual bidding works best. With it, you can more explicitly control your costs by manually setting the maximum amount you are willing to pay per click. You can also then set a bid for specific keywords based on how important they are for reaching your target consumers as they shop for groceries online.

While optimized bidding works best when you want control over performance. With optimized bidding you can set the target ROAS you want your campaign to achieve with your specified budget. Instacart then leverages machine learning to dynamically adjust your campaign bids to deliver your target performance. 

Give time to optimize 

If you decide to use optimized bidding because you want to achieve a target ROAS with the ‘low lift’ approach automation brings, it is important to set your target ROAS around the recommendation for your category. Our algorithm continuously learns how to deliver your desired ROAS performance, taking into account market conditions over the last 30 days. This works best if you give your campaign enough time to adjust and optimize. We recommend letting optimized bidding campaigns run for ~2 weeks before assessing their performance. 

Ready to partner with you

While these best practices are a great starting point to getting the most out of your sponsored product ad campaigns, our team is ready to work with you on the specifics that best apply to your unique business and its goals. 

¹ Instacart Analytics, Q2 2024

^*Recommendations and suggestions do not guarantee any specific results or level of performance.

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.