Instacart delivers increased ad targeting capabilities
Instacart continues to build its functionality as a promotional platform.
The leading on-demand delivery provider is releasing a new collection of advertiser solutions, including brand pages and a suite of display applications designed to maximize brand reach and consumer awareness for CPG brands. The new products are designed to enable advertisers to run a full-funnel marketing strategy throughout the entire consumer shopping journey on Instacart – from awareness to consideration to purchase.
Brand pages
Instacart’s new brand pages offering enables CPG brands to drive consumers – both on and off Instacart – to a curated, shoppable destination where the consumer can shop the brand’s product portfolio from their selected retailers. Brand pages are free to create and allow advertisers to customize layouts and create product collections with rich imagery and text.
Advertisers can leverage unique URLs to send traffic from Instacart display ads, as well as off-platform marketing campaigns, directly to a shoppable digital storefront. Consumers can take action to purchase items directly from brand pages, which show products in stock from their last-shopped retailer.
Display ads
Instacart also unveiled a new suite of display ads solutions designed to complement brand pages. These auction-based ads will appear throughout the shopping journey on Instacart, enabling brands to promote engaging, targeted, creative content to consumers.
These include banners that can be placed across discovery surfaces, from keyword search through browsing storefronts, departments, and aisles. Display ads also enable brands to reach new customers with customized targeting that is based on anonymized purchase behavior or specific keywords.
Instacart has been expanding its capabilities as a platform for CPG advertising for the past 18 months. In May 2020, the company rolled out a self-serve ad service called Instacart Ads which brands and agencies can use to purchase search ads, set goals and advertising budgets, and manage bidding.
And in October 2021, Instacart collaborated with e-commerce marketing platform CommerceIQ on an offering called CIQ Advertising for Instacart. The new service, which includes an API integration, enables CPG brands to obtain real-time visibility across all their campaigns on the Instacart Ads self-serve ad platform, as well as leverage CommerceIQ artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities to automatically optimize Featured Product ads on Instacart in bulk.
“As more people turn to Instacart to shop from their favorite retailers and discover new products, we’re focused on creating unique ways to help brands engage consumers throughout their online shopping journey,” said Ryan Mayward, VP of ad sales at Instacart. Our new products are part of Instacart’s ongoing commitment to develop innovative advertising solutions that support brands of all sizes as they focus on driving awareness, introducing exciting new products, maximizing reach, and inspiring consumers as they browse the digital aisles.”
Brand pages and display ads will both be available in the Instacart Ads self-service portal, Ads Manager, and provide reporting to give brands visibility into anonymized and retailer-agnostic data insights, shopping behaviors, and trends. New features and tools now available within Ads Manager include daily budgeting capabilities, product content control via a library manager tool, and on-demand business data via a customer insights solution, all accessible in a self-service portal.
Instacart says it offers self-service and managed ad services for more than 4,000 CPG brands. The company also partners with API providers that have built campaign management and optimization applications leveraging the Instacart Ads API.
Ben & Jerry’s, Breyers, Kidfresh, Klondike, Milton’s Craft Bakers, Talenti and Tillamook are among the first CPG advertisers to leverage Instacart Ads’ new solutions. The new suite of display ads is now available to all advertisers. Brand pages are currently being piloted by select advertisers and will soon be available to all Instacart brand partners.