How brands can maximize growth using Instacart advertising and win the online grocery competition.
Summary
For this webinar, we’ve invited Stefan Jordev, Director of Marketplace Strategy & Insights at Bobsled Marketing, to help us uncover how brands can maximize growth with Instacart.
Key Takeaways
How to Maximize Growth
- Top of Search importance: 90% of ad clicks on all paid placements in search results, and 40% of all clicks on the results, including organic search results.
- SKU segmentation: Use hyper-segmentation to drive efficiencies. Create campaign structures around tiered pricing.
- Bidding competitively: Use Default Bids to Negatively Target for incrementality & strategic budget reallocation
- Repeat purchases are especially important: by a customer’s 10th order, 25%of all conversions are from the Your Items / Buy It Again aisle.
Transcript
Luke
Allright. Good morning, everyone. This is the Pacvue and Bobsled webinar for where Instacart Fits in Your Brands Marketplace Strategy. I am Luke McGinnis; an account director here at Pacvue, and I’m joined with Stefan Jordev from Bobsled.
Stefan
Hi, everyone.
Luke
Our agenda today, we’re gonna be discussing Instacart today, what the status of Instacart is, and current strategies and benefits. How to maximize growth, key drivers, measuring success. And then, at the end, we’ll have a Q and A where we can get all your questions answered about Pacvue. Pacvue is a best-in-class enterprise solution that advertisers use on Instacart and multiple other e-commerce advertising channels. We’re a platform used by agencies, brands, and sellers, and it allows you to combine your holistic performance data as well as recommended actions to take on your advertising campaigns.
Stefan
A few words about Bobsled. We are an Amazon-focused digital agency established in 2015. We, of course, support Walmart and Instacart as well. We work with third-party sellers. We work with vendors. We work with hybrid accounts, meaning accounts that have both a seller central and a vendor central account where thought leaders can just base, including a weekly Forbes column owned by our CEO Kiri Masters.
And we have been named as one of the top 18 Amazon solution providers by business insider recently. And we do have an upcoming book on Instacart titled Instacart for CMOs coming up in less than a week. The launch date is March the 10th. I do hope you check it out. It features a lot of expert insights from many experts in the industry, including Pacvue Co-Founder and President Lucia Burdick. Just search for Instacart for CMOs on Amazon, and you should be able to pre-order it today.
And yeah, we can talk about where Instacart is today before taking a look at what the future might hold for it. And on the next slide, we have a few numbers for you. We will be talking about its potential a lot, but just taking a look at a snapshot of Instacart’s current situation has some impressive numbers to show us. With consistent investment efforts, Instacart is now available to about 85% of the US household, and about 70% of the Canadian households. I don’t have that number in here, but it’s about 70% of shops in Canada. They have more than 500 million products available. These products are available in-store to their more than 500 now partners, and they have more than half a million shoppers working on Instacart. So, some pretty impressive numbers. One particular look at Instacart’s potential at the moment.
And the pandemic has affected all aspects of our lives, and grocery shopping hasn’t been an exception. A lot of shifts happening here as well with about 22% of Americans have shifted from weekend to weekday shopping runs and more and more of them are placing orders during working hours. So, I’m sure this is a friendship that Instacart appreciates as it will even out the high order days. And it will just give Instacart shoppers a good chance of meeting their two-hour delivery targets without too much effort or too much hustle compared to previously when it was all concentrated in weekends.
A lot of brands have been wondering about what happens to e-commerce grocery once the pandemic ends. And I think a lot has been written on this topic throughout 2020. I think every piece of research published lately, including the one we’re featuring here on the slide, indicates that the e-commerce grocery is here to stay beyond a pandemic. We even see the category growing and I think in short, customers will continue to shop online and retailers and manufacturers will continue to invest in e-commerce.
I think this is where it becomes more of a benefit and a convenience thing than anything dependent compared to anything to pandemic might have driven until now. And in this slide, we’re featuring an illustration about how the pandemic has not only shifted but also accelerated some online habits for us. 2021 shopping habits are where we initially expected them to be four years from now. These are where we initially saw them being in 2025. So, today customers are more driven by values and purpose.
So, this is definitely something that brand managers will have to solve for and have to find a solution for. And basically, brands will have to find a way to be where their customers are instead of being where they want them to be. Whether that’s in-store, whether it’s online or any online marketplace, they choose to do business on in the future. So, I guess this is where the omnichannel comes into play for a lot brands.
And I think we covered a lot of Instacart’s potential and its growth. So, I just wanted to include a few challenges. A few threats that are lurking around Instacart. To just call out a few. I think the first is a pretty big one. Retailers developing their own platform has been a challenge, has been a thread that has followed Instacart since its introduction. The possibility of being too slow to win advertising share. I think just one, especially as it connects to the first one, they only have the featured products as a standalone service at the moment.
So, if they don’t make any moves if they don’t get more additional advertising dollars going towards the platform, that’s a potential threat for Instacart’s growth. Staying profitable might be considered a threat for Instacart, as it is a threat for the entire category of online grocery. I don’t think the profits are too big when it comes to the category as a whole and Instacart themselves have not published too many profitable ones I believe. Instacart’s gig workforce; I include this as a threat because it is being considered a threat because Instacart has taken some criticism about its employee status, employees’ wages. So, this might be something we should be keeping an eye on.
Luke
Awesome. Stefan. On Instacart, there’s multiple different ad types that are available. We have currently four different ad types. As Stefan had mentioned on the previous slide, the standalone offering is featured products. And featured products is what you’re allowed to, for an API partner like Pacvue to connect to and manage your advertising campaigns for you through Instacart.
So, there’s automation tools out there, like Pacvue that you can log in and manage your ad management and campaigns through your package. Feature products is a lot like sponsored products on other retailers. It’s very similar to the paid search option. The four other ones are coupons on the hero banner, and then there are delivery promotions as well, but those coupons hero banner and delivery promotions, those are managed fully on Instacart’s platform through their UI, through their service. So, feature products is standalone and you can use an API partner to help you manage that and set up automation.
There’s three different placement types in feature products. The first is Search. So, search, as you can see in this side, is where you type in any, for example, it says pizza, you type in pizza. And then, the top featured spots, those are the paid search placements under the featured products. So, like I said, very similar to what sponsored products is on other platforms. It’s keyword-based and it relates to the search term or keyword that you’ve typed in the search bar. The next one is Browse. Browse is when you can, you know, you’re browsing through the platform and you’ll have the similar placements show up as well. Anything that says featured above it is obviously what is a featured product under the page search. And lastly is Buy It Again. So, if you buy products on Instacart, when those products show up to be purchased again, you will have additional products here under the featured section that will be relatable to the products that you’ve recently purchased or purchased in the past.
So, again, to recap here you’ll have search brow search placements, browse placements, and buy it again. All pretty self-explanatory on where they’re going to show up, but those are the three placements that you’ll get under the featured products placement. So, Instacart is, you know, there’s a misconception that it’s solely for CPG and groceries. And there’s been a lot of growth outside of those categories. For example, Best Buy is now available on Instacart.
So, you could literally go onto Best Buy through Instacart and have a TV delivered in that timeframe. And it’s been a big benefit to a lot of early adopters that I’ve seen in this space. There’s been a couple high-value CE brands that have advertised TV selections on Best Buy. And, I’ve seen a lot of success there. So, the consumer electronic space is very valuable for this Best Buy option. And it’s not just including on the grocery retailers as well.
And next there has been explosive growth in the pet category. So, this is very awesome for Petco. So, you can go on here to Instacart, do your pet orders, pet food orders, very competitive with Chewy and Amazon. So, again, like I said, outside of the grocery and CPG categories, you have pets, dog food at Petco, you have Best Buy. And then, lastly, we also have beauty for Sephora.
So, you can now, you know, if you’re a beauty brand, if you’re a pet brand, if you’re a CE brand, you can take advantage of Instacart’s offering as well as be an early adopter and take advantage of these advertising promotions and advertising spots and capture some low-hanging fruit. So, to recap here, again, it’s a big growth opportunity on Instacart for consumer electronics brands, pet brands as well as beauty brands as well.
Okay. So, next, we’re going to talk about maximizing your growth using search and using Instacart. First the ability to maximize growth is the top of search importance, right. This is very similar to top of search on any other retailer, right? The top placements are where all, almost all of the ad clicks take place. So, as you can see here, 90% of ad clicks take place on the top three placements. The top three placements are the most valuable that’s where everyone wants to show up. So, capturing that market share is extremely important. Additionally to that 40% of all clicks on the results, including organic search results. So, the top placements, when you’re using feature products, that’s very, very important to capture that market share, and using tools like Pacvue automation features really allows you to capture that type of placement. So, you’re not on your own. There’s tools out there in the market like Pacvue. They can help you capture that market share and ensure that you’re placing in those top three places.
Instacart covers various channels with assortment across many different price points. So, you can break out your campaigns by ASP and package size, for example. And then the idea is that you can bid while keeping efficiencies high and then increase as your price point increases as well. So, you can use hyper-segmentation here too, to drive efficiencies. There’s lots of different skews segmentation you can, offer on Instacart. It allows you to segment your skews and drive different price points and increase conversions.
Bidding competitively. So, this is very valuable because we’re going to tell you within Instacart where your bid strength is. So how high – is your bid strength low, meaning are you bidding too low? Is it average? Are you bidding high? You’re going to be able to see what your bid strength is. And then, you’re able to see what the hourly changes are to the competitive landscape. So, you’re able to come in here set up default bids to native targeting, as well as find out when – a lot of retailers won’t show you what your bid strength is. This is pretty unique to Instacart.
And I think it’s a very valuable feature because you’re not in the dark when you’re setting up all your default bids on your keywords and search terms. So, you’re able to see what your bid strength is to know if you’re bidding too high, if you’re overspending, or if you’re bidding too low and not capturing enough market share because your bids are too low. So, being able to bid competitively and have the bid strengths within Instacart is an extremely valuable feature. And it’s one of my favorite features within Instacart’s platform pack view also brings us into our platform too, and allows you to automate a lot of your bid changes as well.
Stefan
I’m so glad I get to own this slide in particular. I think this is a very important point I wanted to highlight here. Instacart advertising offers a lot more than just ROI and to be clear, ROI on Instacart is great at the moment. I think it’s better compared to any other marketplace, including Amazon or Walmart. But I think the real value comes with this. By a customer’s tenth order, 25% of all your conversions are from Your Items or the Buy It Again aisle. And this is basically repeat purchases.
So, even though you’re advertising and generating a lot of great sales from advertising, ultimately you might be getting organic sales that were initially influenced by that advertising efforts for months to come. So, I think this is important to have in mind and one to factor in as you’re discussing advertising budget and making decisions about the budget invested on Instacart advertising.
And a few strategy points behind the advertising about tactics we talk about here today, day parting. This is a bit controversial, even on Amazon at the moment. I mean, advertisers are using it and some are just against using it at the moment. But with the stats included here, with stats from Instacart showing us the best days, or even the best times of today to make a purchase on Instacart.
Advertisers may capitalize on this by using and implementing day parting as a tactic within our advertising efforts. Instacart is no exception when it comes to the importance of testing and just testing and expanding on the visibility of the keywords within your campaigns. Basically, that’s the whole foundation of optimizing to feature products as a core aspect of Instacart’s advertising at the moment. And then, of course, monitor your competition, just taking a look at the share of voice or the share of shelf as it comes to Instacart.
It can be a great source of insight for your brand. Just monitor your shelf can help you learn where your brand is on the competitive landscape and can help you strategize on your next move here. So, if you’re searching for a given keyword within single retailer or retailer partner that is listed on Instacart, you might be able to see how much share of shelf you own for that particular keyword
And a few tips for launching your products on Instacart. I have to start by saying, this is a bit of a challenge because this is something that the retailers own. They’re the ones that are providing the UPC to Instacart, and this is how products find themselves list them there. But when it comes to what a brand can do and what the advertising strategy behind launching a new product on Instacart can be, it comes with identifying your budget, learning more about your audience and just looking at incrementality that optimizing your listing and product content can give you.
So, when it comes to talking about budget, and making budget decisions, you might focus on expanding the reach that your products have within the category. And of course, you might focus on building your brand and any volume of search that comes related to your brand on Instacart. When it comes to learning the insights of your audience, or just looking to learn more about who your potential target audience might be, tracking that share of shelf for your brand tracking share of shelf for competitor grants, even generic keywords can help you measure and to optimize accordingly seeing where that audience is and what your next move can be in terms of, “Which keywords I want to go after?”
“How do I want to target this potential target audience”? And just make more data-driven decisions better. And then, when it comes to optimizing the product name, description, and images on Instacart, this is another aspect that I wanted to highlight. It’s at the moment, although I do think it’s being released really soon. At the moment, brands are not able to update product listings on Instacart without the assistance of a third-party tool.
So, a lot of brands have been using a product information management software to update this. This is how it’s being done on Instacart at the moment. As I said, I do think this will change maybe within the month. And when it comes to owning just product listing, owning the content that’s being included on Instacart, I think the brands are the best place to own this. And then, we talk about the key drivers of demand generation, Instacart has a few drivers that actually lead to its own flywheel effect. And we’ll see what it is in a second.
Basically Instacart’s flywheel effect on its own comes down to the repeat purchases. Ninety percent of Instacart customers are repeat customers and 20 to 25% of Instacart shopping activities comes from the purchasing. So, this can be considered Instacart’s flywheel effect and will factor in the SEO and the optimizing for search, the promotions, the product content, the advertising, they all lead to this effect where you are able to generate additional repeat purchases for free coming to you organically.
When we talk about Instacart’s search algorithm, this is a very interesting one. This is definitely something I’ve asked back to you a few times about, and if they’ve heard anything, and it turns out that Instacart are actually very transparent when it comes to how their search algorithm works. And basically, Instacart search algorithm has two main pillars; fulfillment and search and personalization.
And it’s a very complex algorithm because Instacart’s algorithm actually goes in and checks inventory levels across all of their retail partners. And then, it lets you know if the product is available near that zip code you’re searching for, or it doesn’t. And another interesting thing, I want to do a highlight because I think this might be something that becomes very, very interesting in the future. If a product is not available, Instacart has a replacement recommendation model.
So, if you’re unable to find a product you are searching for, Instacart will give you a suggestion. And I just think this is a very competitive and interesting area, and I’m sure brands will be looking to get into more, and possibly Instacart might be even interested in monetizing this. And of course Instacart’s algorithm location-based. You include your zip code when you log into Instacart. And every search you make is dependent on availability of products close to that zip code and will Instacart be able to fulfill it.
So, when it comes to driving repeat purchases, basically we have to factor in the budget and the audience, and incrementality similar to that previous slide we have even if the ROAS is lower than expected at this given time, we have to factor in that there’s a branding play that comes to this. If you’re advertising online on Instacart or any other marketplace, the effect is being included in offline purchases as well.
And audiences do get more informed and start to recognize your brand more. And basically whenever you’re driving these initial purchases, initial sales on Instacart, you do have that option for future up sales, for future cross-sales, or just repeat purchases that Instacart will provide to you.
As I mentioned, when it comes to optimizing content, this is an interesting one. Instacart does not have a self-serve content management system and Instacart actually charges retailers a setup fee to upload product content. So, I think having a relationship with the retail partners is an interesting place for brands to be. And because you will definitely want to reach out to your retailers to check if your products are being included on Instacart. If those UBC’s have been delivered to Instacart, and you might want to check the product content included on that product detail page represents what Instacart should be saying for your product.
As I mentioned, a few tools have been used at the moment. I think Salsify’s one that does a good job at optimizing product content. So, if you’re eager to get ownership of what your products that are associated with your brand on Instacart are stating and has the content at the moment, this might be a solution that brands look into. And coupons and delivery promotions. I am including these because as Luke said, these are not self-serve, they’re managed by Instacart. They sometimes require a larger portion of the budget to be dedicated towards them, but they can play a role even when it comes to the click-through rate conversion rate, as it relates to feature products or simply browsing on Instacart.
So, having a coupon running when advertising a feature product as the screenshot reload illustrates, it will add more relevancy and it might give the potential customer an additional reason to click on this product and ultimately to purchase this product. And of course, delivery options are one of the four available promotional options that Instacart offers. I do think that they’ve fallen behind with the entire pandemic throughout last year.
Luke
Great. So, now what we’re going to discuss is how to measure success and what channels and what levers you can pull to decide if you’re having success on Instacart and track and your performance correctly. The first is leveraging SOV data. So, SOV is a Share Of Voice. This is very similar to a share shelf and what you can do within the tool or with a tool like Pacvue is you can monitor your share of voice by tracking your high-performing keywords, as well as your branded search terms and brand name, to find out how you’re placing amongst all of your competition on Instacart.
So, you can tell how much market share you have within those search results versus your competition. So, you can see where your competitors have weaknesses as well as where you have weaknesses in terms of keyword strength and the ability to own market share for the most placements in the search and browse pages.
So, another big benefit to this too is to find and eliminate adjacent brand noise. So, you can find out if your brands are, you know your tail brands are competing with each other, as well as which market share your brands have versus competition. And then, a big benefit here is tracking progress, right? So, this is how you would measure success.
If you started out using a feature products advertisement campaign, and your share of voice was five percent. And then, that organic grew to eight percent a month after you’d started these campaigns, you could attribute that success to creating those campaigns. So, being able to track and leverage that share of voice data and knowing how much market share you have and your brand has for the keywords that are most important to your brand is very, very important because the larger your share of voice, that means the more places you have and the more opportunity a consumer has to click on your ads.
So, anytime you’re gaining share of voice, anytime you’re gaining market share, and you’re adding more placements for consumers to click on the better. And any time you’re losing that, that’s a very big red flag and an area to be cause for concern. So, leveraging that SOV data and monitoring, that is probably one of the most important things that you can do when tracking your success and progress using advertising campaigns and paid search campaigns.
Next is gaining market share. So, there’s a couple of ways to do this though. Obviously number one, creating really aggressive, budgets and bid amounts to gain those top places. Right. I think we said the 90% of clicks came from the top three ad placements within a campaign or within a search browse page. So, if you have, you know, if you manage your budgets correctly, you can distort the budget to have more impact and gain those higher impact placements.
So, getting your products to surface in those top three advertisement placements on the feature browse page or search page is very, very important. You can also own the aisle with reserve hero banner. So, anytime, it’s one of those other products that we offered where you have the hero banners that really show that it’s across the top of the page.
And basically you own that. It’s almost like you have a billboard of your products in a shopping aisle in retrospect. So you could have your own billboard owning the whole aisle when someone’s searching for products that are very relative to what your brand offers. Another one is incrementality here. So, what you can do is basically you can co-brand and combine products.
So, you can basically, let’s say for example, chips and dip. So, you can basically, if you’re a chip brand, you could partner with a salsa brand or a chip good brand and you guys could create co-branding where you’re offering products together. And it allows you to really set yourself apart from competition in the placement within the site of Instacart. So, Alfred hero banners, where you can own the whole aisle, how monitoring your budget, and offering the top placements on advertising, as well as co-branding with other brands to bring your products to life and be creative and stand from other competitors is the three places that you can really gain the most market share honest occur right now.
That should do it. So, I think what we’ll do now is we will wrap up the conversation and we’ll go with a little bit of discussion here. So, Stefan I believe there’s a couple of just questions here for you.One being, where do you think Instacart is headed in the next five years?
Stefan
It’s a pretty big question, but I feel like they are definitely expanding on the industry verticals that are working with. I think you mentioned it on the slide, which featured our partnership with Best Buy. There will definitely no longer be the grocery platform. There will probably be the platform where you order everything. I still think they continue to be a partner to the stores they’re working with at the moment, as opposed to becoming a seller or retailer partner themselves.
I think we all read the news and I think we’re all very interested when they announced they’re looking to hire or purchase or just develop their own micro fulfillment center. So, they will be ornate owning some inventory. But I just think that Instacart finds a way to improve delivery times, be that last-mile delivery partner to online grocery or any type of other partners. And just continue on adding products, adding categories and adding a assortment, and trying to get a market share a bigger market share with that approach.
Luke
Awesome and next is what is the first step brands should take when getting started with this?
Stefan
I won’t say the first step that brands would take would be to have a conversation with retailers and their partners where products are being sold. I think we mentioned this a couple of times throughout the presentation, but retailers are a key stakeholder when it comes to Instacart. They have the inventory and they have the product availability. I mean, they own it. They’re the ones that are providing the data to Instacart.
So, I mean, having that conversation with your retail partners, maybe doing a simple search on Instacart yourself to see if your products are already available would be the very first steps I would take. And once those products, if I find out that the products are being included on Instacart, are being available, it’s going to come down to figuring out who will own Instacart within your company and starting to dedicate some budgets behind it.
Luke
Yeah great. And in the other slides, we discussed other retailers on Instacart, like Best Buy, Petco Support, et cetera. So, for those brands that are in the consumer electronics space, the beauty space, the pet care space, and other retailers and they’re now on Instacart, what should they be thinking? Do you think it’s too early for them to be getting started?
Stefan
It might be, but it might be the advantage that comes with it. I mean, it’s a CPC-based platform. There’re competitive offers when it comes to whose product will be displayed there. And I think you can only gain by being among the first ones to market. I think that was a major point that Pacvue had when we started discussing about the profitability of Instacart. If you’re the first one there, your CPC and rates are great, your ROI is great. So, I think all of these marketplaces blend our CPC and auction-based platforms being among the first ones there. I mean, brands can only gain from it, right?
Luke
Yeah, Yep. I totally agree. Being an early adopter. And I think we’ve said it three or four times in this presentation that capturing the top three placements in the search and browse pages is the most effective, right? Ninety percent of clicks come from those top three spots. Well, if you’re on one of those retailers that there’s no saturation and there’s no competition, you can easily capture those top three spots with a low CPC cost. I think that’s a huge benefit, right? So, that’s a big benefit of being an early adopter is to be able to capture those top three placements with a very, very low bid and CPC costs due to lack of competition. So, lastly here, what is the, or how much investment is needed initially on Instacart if you know?
Stefan
I don’t think there’s a minimum investment required. And I think when you get that ROI within a few weeks, you might be able to start with a very low budget and just test to see what it does. I think it’s no secret when it comes to – 2020 everybody was working with leftover budgets. I mean, from campaigns that got canceled because of the pandemic, I really feel like a lot of brands have broached into the card with, you know, “I have 10% of the budget from Amazon. I have 10% of the budget for Walmart and this is what I want to do. This is what I want to take it and test Instacart.” So, just having that initial budget to start advertising on Instacart and then making a decision based on the ROI and based on the goals you have set, that might be the approach that ends up working for most brands.
Luke
Great. That was that was very informative Stefan. I really appreciate it. Next, what we’re going to talk about is we have our Q and A. And I think the chat’s already been blowing up with a lot of really, really good questions.
Stefan
Awesome.
Luke
Definitely. If you don’t mind, I’d love to just read through them with you and maybe we can offer the or get these answered really quick.
Stefan
I’d love to.
Luke
Yeah. Cool. So, the first question was; she said, sorry if I missed this, but can hyper target advertising get down to the geo banner location?
Stefan
Basically, no, you’re using keyword targeting. You’re using keywords as the main target and the zip code location is being determined by the person logged into Instacart and including that zip code they’re searching for, this is called that inventory availability is being determined, but you, as an advertiser, you have control over the keywords you’re going after.
Luke
Awesome. And, do you know what the required Budget is to be able to use coupon promotion?
Stefan
I don’t have an actual budget here, but I actually think we have a comment here and I did want to address this. This goes back to that question related to budgets. So, if you talk to the Instacart salesperson, your Instacart partner, they are actually very open-ended. These are the guys that can give you a good guidance on the budget when it comes to advertising or coupons or any sorts of delivery promotions here.
Luke
Yeah, that’s great. Yeah, I definitely, there’s a lot of these questions I would definitely reach out and follow up with your Instacart salesperson on note, definitely provide a lot of guidance on budget and benchmarks and process stuff. Another question that we had here was; does Pacvue provide the capability to track a SOV, share a voice of a brand, burst competition across retailers? And yes, Pacvue does offer that. And it’s a very, very awesome tool.
Awesome feature Pacvue has. So, feel free to reach out after the presentation and we can show you that platform as well. So, yes, Pacvue does offer the capability to track SOV versus brands in competition. And then, someone asks; what’s the best way to track your own share of voice in competitive SOV? Tracking it on your own is – that’s a tough one.
I would always recommend possibly using an API partner that automates that information for you because tracking it on your own is a little bit difficult because I don’t know if the reporting is quite there yet where you can really track it on your own. So, definitely look at using an API partner of Instacart’s like Pacvue. And Stefan a question here, and not sure if you’re able to answer this one, but are there any recommendations for using Instacart or promote categories that don’t have UPCs, fresh meat, Deli, et cetera?
Stefan
I don’t think I have an answer for this one. I mean, you have to have a product being listed on Instacart to add it to your campaign when it comes to self-serve and when it comes to feature products. So, I would have to assume these products have to be available on Instacart for you to be utilizing advertising.
Luke
Great. And then, how do you know if your products are in the top three spots?
Stefan
So, three things you will be checking to see if your bids are being competitive. You have to have that dream spot that you mentioned that Instacart provides for you. I mean, you can always do a search from different zip codes and see if your products are being included in there. But the two things, two ways to make sure that your products are populating those placements are tracking share shelf for that particular search term for that particular keyword and see how much of that placement you own, and then making sure that your bids are competitive.
So, periodically checking to see if you are among the highest-rated bids to be able to calculate that placement. I mean, those would be the two things I see. “Is my share voice growing, declining or remaining steady.” And if I’m being competitive enough with my bids to be able to get displayed on those placements.
Luke
Great. Another question here. It says, have you seen any success with shared advertising campaigns, meaning have brands partner with retailers to establish collaborative strategies to spend via Instacart advertising to encourage sales or most retailers prefer brands to run Instacart ads 100% on their own? Are there any other sorts of benefits you’ve seen retailers offer when brands are willing to invest heavily in Instacart ads, if not collaboration on the campaigns and/or spend?
Stefan
I think this is a great question. And I think this is part of the recommendation. I think that close collaboration between retailers and brands would be key to success here, even when it comes to just, “Hey, I’m gonna run Instacart advertising. Can you let me know about inventory levels? How much do we have to sell? And what can you do on your end to reinforce this?” To be honest, I haven’t had a chance to have a discussion with both the brand and a retailer about some cohesive strategy that includes both, but in theory, I think it’s just a great idea.
You have to have influenced on both the brand about how much they want to invest, where the budget will be coming from and how success will be measured. Then of course, you have to come to the retailer, you know, being able to highlight those products, make it easier for the Instacart shoppers to find it, just being able to fulfill the orders from the traffic that you have going on.
Luke
Great. And then, the share of shelf metric. This is, something’s been out for us a couple of times here. Is there any share of shelf metrics or share of voice metrics available through Instacart’s advertising platform through their UI? Or do you need to use a tool like Pacvue?
Stefan
To be honest, the share of shelf one I’ve only used it to Pacvue. And what I really like about it is you select the retail partner and then you measure share of shelf against it. I don’t think the share of shelf in terms of entering a keyword, tracking it periodically day by day, and see how much shared voice you have through it is available natively on Instacart at the moment. No, it might be something that they include in the future, but so far, I think it’s only through Pacvue that I’ve used personally.
Luke
Great. Yeah. So, again, I think this is another question I would always reach out to your Instacart salesperson asking further your Instacart sales rep or whoever against your Instacart contacts are and ask them for their information on that as well as any guidance on budgets or certain Instacart nuances as well. One last question here I believe is, does Instacart allow bidding for CPGs on paid search terms for specific retailers? Or do we need to partner with the retailer to do this?
Stefan
If I understand this correctly? Yes, they do. I mean basically your products are being sold across many retailers and you are bidding on keywords related to the products that are being listed for those. So, this is definitely something you can do. I mean, to use an example, your products are available on Walmart, your products are available on all other – Family Dollar is the latest one that they partnered up with and you are able to bid on keywords related to your products, not necessarily to retailer per se, but definitely something that you can get exposure to because a customer logs in, enters their zip code and even chooses a marketplace, a partner they’re searching for.
So, owning those keywords for the products that are being included in that retailer is definitely a possibility on Instacart.
Luke
Great. Well, if I believe that sums up all of the questions that were asked through the Q and A as well as through the chat. So, if anyone else has any questions, you can reach out to myself, here’s some contact information here or Stefan and we’ll gladly get you answered. Like we said, we’ll share the presentation after with the attendees. So, we’ll be sending that out as well as a recording to this webinar. And if nobody has any additional questions, I believe we’ll let you get on with your day, and feel free to reach out to myself.
