QBR Media’s Systematic & Strategic Approach To Maximizing Growth On Instacart

QBR Media, an Instacart Preferred Partner, provides budget allocation, retail media management, digital activations, and omnichannel strategy to help its clients succeed in the evolving, and often complex, retail media landscape. By focusing on emerging CPG brands, they have developed extensive expertise in guiding challenger brands through the large menu of advertising opportunities available with the Instacart Ads ecosystem.  

Their data and process-driven strategies bring the right lens to the strategic decisions brands must make in order to ensure their investments deliver results. While there is no one-size-fits-all approach to advertising with Instacart Ads, their success in helping clients chart a clear path through the landscape puts them in position to offer proven guidance. 

The first step to advertising on the Instacart Ads ecosystem, advises Niccolò Gloazzo, founder of QBR Media, is aligning your objectives and circumstances with your approach. This is a budgeting and planning exercise. Then when it comes to running campaigns, he recommends starting with sponsored product ads to set a foundation before moving up the funnel with additional formats and tactics.

Defining budget and success metrics

“When budgeting for Instacart, think in terms of a percentage of revenue rather than fixed dollar amounts,” said Niccolò Gloazzo, QBR Media. “Start by forecasting your expected revenue from retailers, then allocate a portion of that revenue to reinvest in retail media networks like Instacart.”

The specific percentage of revenue that QBR media recommends their clients budget for advertising with Instacart greatly depends on which strategic path they want to take — a conservative, aggressive, or moderate approach. 

A conservative approach works best if the primary goal is to remain profitable on the first purchase and establish an initial performance baseline before scaling. With this approach, your primary success metric should be achieving a breakeven return on ad spend (ROAS) target. QBR Media sees clients investing between 2 to 5% of their revenue when they decide to be conservative. 

With an aggressive approach, the percentage is 3-4x that amount. An investment rate that is useful for emerging brands that want to drive high unit volume and rapidly gain digital market share. With this rate, CPG brands should be more focused on new-to-brand customer acquisition and category share growth as their success metrics, often with a lower ROAS target that factors in the expected repeat purchase rates. 

And for products that experience seasonality and volume fluctuations, Niccolò recommends a mix of both. Operate conservatively as your default, but take a more aggressive approach during key periods like peak shopping seasons, product launches, promotional windows supported by in-store activity, and times when you’re launching with new retail partners.

“QBR Media has been an invaluable strategic partner, guiding our test-and-learn approach to understand how shifts in ad spend can impact our ROAS, new-to-brand buyers, and market share," said Emily Jenkins, Brand & Strategy Director of Retail Business at Daily Harvest. "We're grateful for their support in making smart, data-driven decisions to fuel our long-term business growth."

Setting the foundation with sponsored product ads

“For brands just launching on Instacart, start with sponsored products,” said Wilson Hung, Co-founder, QBR Media, “this bottom-of-funnel advertising format is the most direct path to moving units and generating immediate results.”

For clients who prefer manual bidding, QBR Media recommends spending under 20% of the budget on branded terms and the bulk of the budget on non-branded, high-intent keywords directly related to the product category.

Instacart recommends utilizing optimized bidding — which automatically sets bids for your ads and dynamically adjusts them throughout the day. Taking into account many factors, our advanced algorithm automatically determines the optimal bidding strategy to generate the largest-possible expected sales revenue while adhering to the target ROAS you set. 

This functionality was designed for advertisers who are looking for a result-driven option when running ad campaigns and prefer the ‘low touch’ approach automation provides over manually setting and maintaining bids. 

Moving up funnel with display advertising

Once you’ve established a strong performance with sponsored products, QBR Media usually recommends its clients begin experimenting with display advertising. 

Display ads, shoppable display ad, and shoppable video ads offer valuable real estate for brands to showcase engaging creative that showcases product benefits and usage occasions while also conveying your brand personality. 

They also unlock advanced targeting capabilities, helping you reach customers who may not be actively searching for your products, but are browsing relevant categories or demonstrating behaviors that signal purchase intent. 

QBR Media recommends to re-engage with consumers who have already shown interest in your brand, like those who have previously purchased your products, among other signals, before running ads on search results for relevant keywords. 

Instacart is also running open beta on optimized performance for display ads, which allows advertisers to deliver more relevant display ads based on algorithms that leverage consumer intent and surface context, such as consumer interests, what’s in their cart, and ad surfaces they engage with, to determine the most relevant placements. 

“As Instacart Ads continues to grow in both sophistication and complexity, we see the potential for it to become a powerful engine for sustainable growth and deeper connections with consumers,” said Niccolò. “The opportunity for brands has never been greater, or more nuanced, and QBR Media is here to our clients with data-driven strategy tailored to their goals and unique context.”

Prior results do not guarantee future outcomes.   

This post contains third-party claims and advertisements. Instacart does not make any representation as to the accuracy or suitability of any of the information provided herein by our third party advertisers.  

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