Unrivaled Insight into Your Brand’s Performance with New ‘Category Share of Digital Shelf’ Reporting 

At Instacart, we provide our brand partners with a suite of ad formats, tools, and analytics to enable them to drive positive outcomes for their businesses. The reporting and analytics we provide form a key part of what we offer. Brands need trusted, transparent measurement solutions in order to understand what worked, formulate plans, and make projections. 

On that front, we have achieved a lot. We earned Media Rating Council accreditation for impression, click, and viewability metrics across our sponsored product, display, shoppable display and shoppable video formats. We collaborated with Circana to analyze the nuances of consumer behavior across online and brick-and-mortar shopping, demonstrating the incremental value of Instacart.

Now, we are excited to reveal additional analytics measuring the ‘category share of digital shelf’ brands have acquired on Instacart. The new metric provides a holistic view into how your different brands are performing in their categories. It can function as a business health indicator and enable you to quickly identify trends and make data-driven business decisions.

Category share of digital shelf communicates the percentage of impressions for your products for a given keyword search category. At a high level, we derive the metric by dividing the number of impressions for your products by the total number of all impressions on the digital shelf that are within your category. In this context, the total number of impressions on the digital shelf means the products displayed to the consumer on a single search results page at once, without scrolling, when they perform any of the most common searches for the category.¹ 

Let’s look at a simplified example for a fictional brand— 

In this example, because four products are displayed at once, the total digital shelf is four. The brand’s products were in two of the four impressions — one sponsored and one organic — so their category share of digital shelf is 50%. 

We are launching this reporting as a new page in Ads Manager, directly accessible from the navigation bar. On the Share of digital shelf page, you can select the time frame and category you want to report on, as well as explore your top brand-category combinations that are gaining share, opportunity areas where you have a low share or are losing share, and review how your brand stacks up against four blinded competitors. 

All of this provides you with an understanding of your brand’s position on Instacart. Similar to how you monitor your share of shelf in-store to understand your position and how you are showing up to your customers when they shop in-store, category share of digital can do the same for when they’re shopping through Instacart. By monitoring the reporting, you can identify trends over time to help inform your strategies and grow your business on Instacart.

Category share of digital shelf reporting will be available to all advertisers in the coming months². For more information, please reach out to your Instacart Ads rep. 

¹ Specifically, the metric is available as a percentage on the brand level for consumer searches only, inclusive of both paid and organic placements. The Instacart digital shelf encompasses all slots a consumer may see in the viewport of their device during a single page visit before scrolling to a different page. The denominator reflects products on the Instacart shelf that are within your category only, based on Nielsen hierarchy. 

² Category share of digital shelf reporting may not be available for all categories. Please consult with your account team.

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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.