Instacart Offers Google Shopping Ads for CPG Partners

Grocery tech company Instacart and Google have revealed that Google Shopping ads are now accessible to Instacart’s advertising partners, using the company’s retail media data. This expansion enables consumer packaged goods (CPG) companies on Instacart, including Danone’s Oikos; Kraft Heinz brands Kraft, Lunchables, Oscar Mayer and Philadelphia; and Publicis Media’s CPG clients, to activate the Google Shopping ads, which are powered by Instacart’s first-party retail media data and closed-loop insights, to reach high-intent consumers searching on Google and get their products to those consumers in as fast as an hour.

Instacart provides unique rich insights on consumer shopping behavior from a catalog of more than 1.4 billion products at 1,400-plus retail banners. Google Shopping ads featuring the CPG brands on Instacart can now scale to consumers shopping across Google more than 1 billion times a day. With Instacart-powered Google Shopping ads, consumers can see ads for participating brands’ products as they search and click to complete a shopping trip on Instacart, with same-day delivery available.

[Read more: “Caper Carts Now Feature Personalized Ads”]

“Instacart’s closed-loop platform and first-party retail media data are critical differentiators for CPG brands,” said noted Laura Jones, chief marketing officer of San Francisco-based Instacart. “Today, our team works with more than 5,500 brand partners to help them grow their businesses and drive incremental sales. With our collaboration with Google, we’re now able to layer our valuable retail media data over Google Shopping ads’ capabilities to enhance audience signals for our CPG partners’ campaigns off of Instacart. Over the last year, we’ve extended the power of Instacart Ads off-platform with a number of partners, and now we’re enabling our brand partners to reach the right audience while they search on Google and seamlessly drive them to purchase on Instacart. Every marketing dollar counts in today’s macroeconomic environment, and we’re pleased with the early pilot results – from return on ad spend to ‘new-to-brand’ sales – that we’re delivering for our partners.” 

“Danone is excited to participate in this pilot alongside Instacart to test new digital solutions with our partners, and continue to effectively utilize retail data to positively impact our health-driven brands,” said MK Woltz, director media connections at White Plains, N.Y.-based Danone. “We’ll be interested to see the performance of this new ad solution that can hopefully enable a best-in-class consumer journey to purchase our brands directly from their search query.” 

According to New York-based market research firm Insider Intelligence, U.S. digital retail media ad spend is expected to double from $46 billion in 2023 to an estimated $109 billion in 2027 – a figure expected to be larger than connected TV, digital audio and linear TV combined. This growth is driven by the strength of first-party commerce data, which enables more effective optimization and closed-loop results. 

Over the past 18 months, Instacart has augmented its full-funnel tool kit of advertising solutions with such new ad formats and features as pop-ups, shoppable video, promotions and impulse, in addition to new measurement capabilities. On average, Instacart Ads deliver more than 15% incremental sales lift, and in some cases twice that, for brand partners, according to the company.

Instacart works with more than 1,400 national, regional, and local retail banners to facilitate online shopping, delivery and pickup services from more than 80,000 stores across North America on the Instacart Marketplace.