What you need to know about Instacart's new display advertising products

This week, Instacart announced exciting new products within their self-service Ads Manager portal –  advertisers can now launch display advertising campaigns directly through the native ad console.

Since launching its advertising solutions in 2020, Instacart has rolled out a number of different advertising options such as email marketing, coupons, and hero banners, which serve on the home page and category level within retailers. Prior to yesterday’s product announcement, Instacart’s flagship Sponsored Product offering was the only solution available via its self-service portal, Ads Manager. 

The introduction of display advertising is a major step for Instacart, increasing the number of options available for advertisers to capitalize on customer traffic and grow their brand. Display ads can now be managed by advertisers independently and compete in ad auctions.

How do Instacart's Display Ads work?

Instacart’s new suite of display products are auction-based ads that appear throughout the shopping journey on Instacart, enabling brands to promote engaging, targeted, creative content to consumers. The new suite of display products includes banners that can be placed across discovery surfaces – from keyword search through browsing storefronts, departments, and aisles. 

Display ads also equip brands to reach new customers with customized targeting that is based on anonymized purchase behaviour or specific keywords; this is new to Instacart's self-serve ad platform. While keyword targeting involves selecting and bidding on distinct, exact-match search terms, behavioural targeting allows advertisers to target custom audiences based on anonymized purchase behaviour.

The ability to target customers based on anonymized purchase behaviour enables advertisers many more options when it comes to developing a full-funnel ad strategy for the Instacart marketplace. For instance, advertisers can choose to target a distinct customer group based on which categories customers have purchased from within a set date range.

Advertisers can also layer multiple audiences at once, enabling further control over ad strategy. For awareness strategies, advertisers can choose to negate past purchasers of their brand, selecting a distinct purchasing window.

At Perpetua, we anticipate major changes to the way that brands approach advertising on Instacart with increased budgets during the remainder of Q1 and further into 2022. These advanced capabilities open up a world of opportunity for advertisers to think more strategically about their full funnel strategy on Instacart. To learn more about Instacart advertising and how to grow your eCommerce business, email us at hello@perpetua.io