Grocery retail media, 2027 edition
This guide explains how Instacart advertising works: what each ad format does, what it costs, how the auctions work and what changed at Instacart in 2026. It then walks through your first campaigns in Instacart Ads Manager, step by step.
Sources are listed at the end of the page.
In one paragraph
Instacart ads let brands pay to show their products in the Instacart app and website (in search results, aisles and on the home page) and on retailer sites and in stores that run Instacart's ad technology. Sponsored products are priced per click, display and video ads per thousand impressions, both by auction, and brands buy them self-serve in Instacart Ads Manager.
Instacart Ads is the advertising business of Instacart, which describes itself as a leading grocery technology company. It is a retail media network that owns no stores: its ads run on a marketplace of more than 2,200 retail banners, representing nearly 100,000 stores, and Instacart says it can deliver to more than 98% of households in North America. The same campaign can extend to retailer sites that use Carrot Ads, Instacart's technology that lets retailers run their own retail media, and to Caper Carts, the smart shopping carts Instacart makes for physical stores.
Instacart reports its ad business as one line, "advertising and other revenue", and says substantially all of it is advertising. The line reached $1,065 million in 2025, up 11%, and grew 16% in each of the first two quarters of 2026. Instacart forecast growth of 15% to 18% for the third quarter. More than 9,000 brands advertised at the end of 2025.
Instacart's own reach figure is more than 55 million unique visitors to the Instacart Ads ecosystem over 12 months, measured by Comscore. For the network at a glance, see our Instacart Ads network profile.
Instacart Ads news
Newest first, April to September 2026. The changes that matter most to advertisers: every campaign now picks a Scope, Gopuff runs Carrot Ads, Immersive Feed brought vertical shoppable video, and Ads Manager added a Grow objective.
Gopuff will join the Instacart Marketplace and use Carrot Ads for its own U.S. storefront. Brands will be able to extend Instacart Ads campaigns to Gopuff and BevMo! shoppers, or buy Gopuff-only campaigns through their Instacart team. Instacart now counts more than 310 Carrot Ads partners.
Instacart announced the Store Excellence Portal, which shows brands daily store-level shelf data and estimates of sales lost to out-of-stocks. It is rolling out with select grocers and brands.
Every new sponsored product, display and shoppable display campaign now asks you to choose a Scope: the whole Instacart Ads ecosystem, or partner-specific ads for one partner. Reports filter by campaign scope. Spotlight collections on Pages retired on September 21, and the 4:5 small-screen banner on Pages retires on November 11, 2026.
Instacart launched Clementine, an AI shopping assistant, across the U.S. and Canada. TechCrunch reports it will surface relevant deals and promotions. Instacart's announcement says nothing about ads; in June, Marketing Dive reported that Instacart would likely start testing ads in its assistant in the second half of 2026.
The line reached $297 million, up 16% from $255 million, ahead of the 11% to 14% growth Instacart had forecast. Instacart said AI recommendations in Ads Manager are now available to all advertisers, and it opened Pinterest self-service campaigns to all its brand partners.
Shoppable display and video ad groups no longer need at least three products (40 is still the limit), and "Buy now" moved to the list of calls to action Instacart does not accept.
At Cannes, Instacart introduced Immersive Feed, a vertical, shoppable video feed of meals and recipes that brands book in Ads Manager. It launched as a pilot, with brands including Hellmann's and Siete Foods. Trade press reported a second launch, Ads Studio, a creative service powered by Local Produce, Instacart's in-house agency.
Ads Manager added a Grow objective, aimed at repeat purchases, and opened the Acquire objective to display ads. On its August earnings call Instacart said it had begun testing Grow, so it may not appear in your account yet.
Weis Markets began rolling out Caper Carts in Pennsylvania and said it will launch on-cart advertising. Caper Carts are live in more than 100 cities.
Instacart opened Ads Manager to retailers, starting with basket-level promotions, which reached general availability on July 15. Retailers now compete with brands for some of the same shopper attention, and Instacart plans sponsored placements for them during 2026.
Advertising and other revenue reached $286 million, up 16%, Instacart's fastest growth in the line since the third quarter of 2023.
Display campaigns gained an Audience step and, for Optimized performance campaigns, a report that splits results into shoppers new to the category, new to the brand, and repeat buyers.
Formats on offer
Instacart sells five self-serve ad formats in Ads Manager, a free brand destination called Pages, brand promotions and a set of managed placements. Instacart display ads come in four kinds, all bought per thousand impressions: shoppable display, shoppable video, display banners and recipe ads. In this guide "display" covers all four, and "display banners" means the banner format. Sponsored products, display banners and shoppable display can also run on Carrot Ads partner sites, and eligible shoppable display on Caper Carts.
Your product appears as a sponsored tile among regular results. Instacart, which used to call the format featured product ads, said in 2024 that the top three sponsored slots take nearly 70% of sponsored product clicks.
A lifestyle image, your logo and a tagline sit above a row of your products that shoppers can add to cart, up to three on mobile and five on desktop, from up to 40 in the ad group.
A 16:9 video of 3 to 30 seconds with a product carousel.
A display banner that links to one of your Pages. It is meant for awareness, and Instacart counts sales for 14 days after a view or a click.
Part of Inspiration Ads: a recipe that features up to 40 of your products as ingredients. Instacart says recipe ads averaged 43% new-to-brand sales and 78% of impressions outside the product's own aisle in its 2025 third-quarter campaigns. Occasion ads, which feature a product collection and have no self-serve setup guide, averaged 36% and 90% on the same measures. Immersive Feed, a 9:16 shoppable video feed of 5 to 30 seconds, is also an Inspiration ad booked in Ads Manager; it launched as a pilot in June 2026, and in August Instacart said it was available on Instacart.
The destination for display and video ads, and a page you can link from your own site and social profiles. Each brand or sub-brand can have one evergreen Page, which Instacart recommends refreshing every 90 days, plus seasonal Pages.
Offers such as "Spend $X, save $Y" or a free gift, set up under Library, then Promotions. A shopper can redeem a brand's promotion once every 30 days, and a promotion's budget cannot be lowered once set.
Order-form placements are sold through Instacart's sales team. Off-platform campaigns run as a managed service or self-service, using Instacart's first-party audiences and sales measurement on partners' platforms.
| Asset | Spec |
|---|---|
| Display banner | Four versions: mobile 3200 x 800 (4:1) and desktop 3200 x 400 (8:1), each with and without a button; JPG or PNG, up to 2.5 MB; text at least 15 px |
| Shoppable display image | 16:9, from 1067 x 600 to 1600 x 900; JPG or PNG, up to 1 MB; minimal text |
| Tagline | Up to 29 characters; ad copy on shoppable display and recipe ads, up to 22 |
| Logo | 1:1, 120 x 120 (at least 72 x 72), up to 0.5 MB, shown as a circle |
| Shoppable video | MP4 or MOV, 3 to 30 seconds, 16:9, up to 500 MB, at least 15 frames per second, with a 16:9 thumbnail |
| Page banner | 16:9 on small screens, 4:1 on large screens |
Buttons may say "Shop", "Shop now", "Shop savings" or "Shop" plus your brand; "Buy now", any label with "Add" and delivery-time promises are not accepted. Creative may not carry QR codes, web addresses or badges that look like Instacart's own, and every image and video needs alt text that names the brand and product and repeats any text in the asset. A denied ad group can be appealed within 14 days.
Older guides mention formats you will not find in today's help center. Universal Campaigns, which Instacart announced in March 2025 to run several formats from one budget, do not appear in the current docs, so ask your Instacart team whether your account has them. Hero banners, delivery promotions and bundles are not in Instacart's current terms; the closest managed products are the home page banner and promo codes.
Money
Instacart ads are priced by auction, with no minimum spend. Sponsored products are paid per click (CPC); RMIQ-managed Instacart campaigns averaged $0.53 per click in our September 2026 benchmarks. Display banners, shoppable display, video and recipe ads are paid per thousand impressions (CPM), with bids from $15. You set a daily or lifetime budget, and optimized bidding needs at least $20 a day.
New advertisers can earn a $300 click credit by running a first campaign on a new Ads Manager account. It covers sponsored products, display banners and shoppable display, and must be used within 90 days of signup. Card accounts are charged each time spend reaches a threshold, typically $500 at first, and a failed payment pauses every campaign until it clears.
On budget pacing, a sponsored product daily budget can spend up to twice the amount on a busy day, and never more than 30.4 times the daily budget in a month. Since November 2025, smart budgeting also weights sponsored product spend by time of day and day of week; Instacart says an alcohol brand's test in the second quarter of 2025 lifted return on ad spend (ROAS) 5.5%. Display campaigns pace spend as Distributed or Accelerated. For more cost figures, see our Instacart Ads benchmarks.
Sponsored products use a second-price auction, a form of auction-based pricing: you pay $0.01 more than the next-highest bid. Instacart ranks ads on your bid, your product's conversion rate and other factors, so the highest bid does not always win. Each product in an ad group competes on its own.
Display banners, shoppable display, video and recipe ads use a first-price auction: you pay what you bid, per thousand impressions, above a floor price of $15. One bid covers the whole ad group, and Instacart's display and recipe docs say ad quality signals also count. Because you pay what you bid, we suggest starting near the minimum and raising the bid if delivery lags.
Hands on in Ads Manager
Instacart Ads Manager is Instacart's self-serve tool for brands. These 12 steps take you from an account request to a sponsored product campaign and a shoppable display campaign, with the labels Instacart's help center uses. Each screen is our drawing of that step, based on the help center in September 2026; your account may differ.
Before you start: have your company's website, the brands you sell on Instacart, a card or invoicing details, and a list of product codes (UPCs). Check that each product has an image on Instacart and healthy stock, because products without images or with low stock across retailers are not shown.
Fill in the form at ads.instacart.com: your name, company email, company name, website and country, and up to three of your top brands on Instacart. Check the box if your ads will include alcohol, and say so if you are an agency. Each country needs its own account.
In Settings, User management sets each person's access: Admin, Read-only or Custom, and whether they can use the Instacart Ads API, for managing bids and reports with software. An account can have up to five admins. Under Billing, add a card and a billing address in your country.
Open Library, choose Start brand setup and submit a few UPCs. Instacart replies within five business days and links your catalog. Add more products later; each batch takes up to three business days.
Click Create campaign. Name it and choose an objective: Maximize sales suits most sponsored product campaigns. Then choose a Scope. For a first campaign, leave it on the Instacart Ads ecosystem; partner-specific ads limit it to one partner. Pick Sponsored product as the format.
Choose a daily or lifetime budget and a start date. Then choose the bid strategy. The two optimized strategies, "Optimized, maximize sales" and "Optimized, boost new-to-brand", set bids for you against a target ROAS; they need at least $20 a day and work best with a low target, so start at or below the recommendation Ads Manager shows. Manual lets you set every bid, and lifetime budgets allow manual only. Optimized is the simpler first step. Save a draft, then click Next.
Name the ad group and add products by name, brand or UPC, or paste UPCs in bulk. Group products that shoppers search for the same way. Watch for Missing Product Images warnings. You cannot remove a product once the ad group is saved, only pause it.
Enter a default maximum cost-per-click (CPC) bid; Ads Manager may suggest one. It covers browse placements and the searches Instacart matches automatically. With optimized bidding, Instacart sets the bids and you do not add keywords, so skip to the next step. With manual bidding, add keywords one per line and give the important ones their own bid. Sponsored product keywords are exact match only, and there are no negative keywords.
The campaign goes live on its start date, usually by noon Pacific. If it does not, its status explains why: Incomplete ad group or Out of budget, or a product marked Unavailable image or Low in stock product. After a few days, open Recommendations. Where history allows, View landscape projects impressions, clicks, sales and spend at different bids over the next seven days, and bid strength shows how competitive each bid is.
In Campaigns, filter by format, date and Scope, then open an ad group to see products and keywords. Export daily or aggregated data as CSV. The gear menu's Show attribution view compares linear with last-touch credit. Review weekly, because sales keep arriving for 14 days after a click. To scale a winner, use the three-dot menu and Copy; keyword override bids copy across, default bids do not.
Display and video ads send shoppers to a Page. Open Library, then Pages, or Create a new page inside a campaign. Pick a template (Brand story, Product collections or Blank page) and add sections: product collections of up to 30 UPCs, an in-page banner or an image with text. Set the Duration to evergreen or seasonal and click Submit for review. Allow up to 72 hours.
Create a campaign with the Engage objective, your Scope and Shoppable display ad as the format. Set a total budget, the pacing and the Audience: Optimized performance, where Instacart adjusts the audience for you, or Manual. Choose up to 40 products, your Page, and a bid of at least $15 per thousand impressions. Upload a tagline of up to 29 characters, a logo and a 16:9 lifestyle image with alt text.
On shoppable display with a Manual audience, target keywords: they default to broad match, and every keyword is subject to Instacart's approval; an "Irrelevant targeting" note means the ad will not serve on that keyword. Then submit at least three business days before the start date. Display banners, shoppable video and recipe ads under the Reach objective can also target behaviors: New to Instacart, Interactions or Purchase behaviors, with lookback windows from 30 to 180 days. Shoppable video under Engage uses keywords, and recipe ads use the Inspiration ad format with Content type Recipe.
Seven mistakes that cost money in the first month
Everything in the steps above is self-serve, as are recipe ads and brand promotions. Home page banners, email and push, retailer storefront banners, promo codes and Gopuff-only campaigns go through Instacart's sales team. If you would rather hand the daily bidding and keyword work to specialists, see our managed Instacart Ads service.
Keywords and bids
On sponsored products a keyword matches only when a shopper types exactly that term: "ice cream" does not match "icecream" or "ice creams". There are no broad or phrase matches and no negative keywords, so you control a costly search term through its bid. A sponsored product ad group can hold up to 8,000 keywords. Display formats differ: they offer exact, narrow and broad match, their exact match includes common synonyms and misspellings, and their ad groups have no keyword limit.
Instacart matches searches to your products automatically at the default bid. When one of those searches earns a click, it appears in your keyword list, marked as autotargeted. Use those terms, your own search data and our Instacart keyword research tool to build the list you bid on by hand.
Optimized bidding sets bids for you against a target ROAS, toward maximum sales or new-to-brand sales, and you cannot add keywords or edit keyword bids. Instacart suggests running it for about two weeks before judging. In General Mills' 2022 A/B tests with Instacart, optimized campaigns earned 7.6% more sales and 49.7% higher ROAS than manual ones. A common pattern is to launch optimized, then use its keyword data to build a manual campaign, the method in our video guide on how to take an Instacart account from 2x to 5x ROAS. See also automated bidding vs manual bidding.
Branded terms usually cost least per click and return the most, though many of those shoppers would have bought anyway. QBR Media, an Instacart partner agency, recommends keeping branded terms under 20% of budget for manual-bidding clients. Category terms such as "greek yogurt" bring new buyers at a higher cost. Perpetua reported in 2021 that competitor clicks almost always cost more than category terms. Instacart publishes no rule against bidding on competitor names, though its policies bar using another brand's marks in your creative.
Video guide
If your Instacart ROAS is stuck around 2x, the data you need to improve it may already be in your account.
An automated campaign is an easy way to start on Instacart: you choose the products and the budget, and Instacart finds the keywords and sets the bids. Once it has run for a while, it has recorded which keywords sell your products and what each click costs. That record is worth more than the campaign itself.
In the first video, Peter, RMIQ's co-founder, shows a client whose own automated campaign sat at roughly 2.4x ROAS for about 2 years. RMIQ has run the account for over a year since, splitting it into campaigns for individual products and managing each one. On about the same spend, its ROAS moved into the 6x to 8x range.
This guide shows how to optimize Instacart ads step by step, using the part of that process you can do by hand: export your keyword data, calculate a new bid for each keyword that matters, rebuild the campaign manually, and then review the results and adjust. The minimum bids, ad formats, and screen labels are as shown in the videos, published in September 2026, so check them in your own account as you go.
Phase 1 of 4 · Steps 1-5 · 5 steps
Start with the automated campaign that has run long enough to collect real data. In Instacart, this is called an optimized campaign.
By now it has recorded:
How much data is enough? One ad group in the video spent $50,000 over 2024 and made $100,000 in sales from about 49,000 clicks. Peter's point is that a tenth of that over a similar period, $5,000 in spend and $10,000 in sales, still gives you plenty to work with.
Do not delete this campaign. You will pause it in Step 15, and its history is the raw material for everything that follows.
Open the campaign and pick the ad group you want to work on.
If the ad group holds several products, the same keyword will appear several times in your export, once for each product it was matched to. Peter's rule for those duplicates: use the row where the keyword spent the most, because the largest sample gives the most reliable numbers.
For future campaigns, use this structure:
1 SKU = 1 ad group
With one product per ad group, every keyword's numbers belong to exactly one product.
Inside the ad group, open the keyword section. It shows how each keyword performed over the campaign's history.
Make sure the date range covers the period you want to analyze. The example in the video uses all of 2024.
Click:
Export Aggregate
This downloads the keyword report for that ad group, with a row for each keyword and product.
Open the export in your spreadsheet tool, for example:
No cleanup is needed first. All you need is the data in a sheet you can sort and filter.
Phase 2 of 4 · Steps 6-14 · 9 steps
The export has more columns than you need for a first pass. Focus on these:
Sort the sheet by:
Spend → Highest to Lowest
Peter's reasoning is that spend shows which keywords matter most to Instacart shoppers. It is also where most of your budget already goes, so changes at the top of the sheet move results the most.
In the video, the top keyword is:
chips
Read across its row and compare:
Chips brings in a lot of sales at a weak ROAS. Keep it: a keyword this central to your category is one you want to keep winning, so the question is what you pay for it.
Look at the keyword's average CPC and ask:
Is this keyword valuable but too expensive?
Your bid is the most you will pay for a click, and average CPC is what you actually paid. ROAS is sales divided by ad spend: if a $5 sale took $2 in ads, ROAS is 2.5x, and if it took $1, ROAS is 5x. For a keyword that already sells well, one likely reason for weak ROAS is that you pay too much per click.
Remember that the automated campaign set this bid for you, based on the data Instacart had at the time. You now have the full history, so you can aim to do better.
Resist the urge to drop the bid straight to Instacart's minimum.
For Instacart Ads Ecosystem campaigns, the minimum bid in the video is:
$0.30
Cut an important keyword from over $1 to $0.30 and it will likely lose most of its auctions, taking its sales with it.
The goal is a bid low enough to lift ROAS and high enough to keep winning most of the auctions for that keyword.
Add a column to your sheet called:
New CPC
For every keyword you plan to keep, decide whether its bid should go down, stay about the same, or go up. This is the core judgment of the whole process.
For example:
| Keyword | Historical CPC | ROAS | New CPC |
|---|---|---|---|
| Chips | $1.42 | Lower than desired | $1.05 |
In the video, the bid on "chips" drops from $1.42 to $1.05, 37 cents less. Peter expects that to improve its ROAS noticeably while keeping the keyword competitive.
Some keywords deserve a higher bid. Look for keywords that:
A modest increase lets them compete in more auctions. In the video, "snacks" performs well on a bid of $0.30, so Peter suggests raising it to $0.37.
Work down the sheet. For each keyword that matters:
When you finish, every keyword you want in the new campaign has its own planned bid.
Trim the sheet down to the keywords you will use and their new bids, for example:
| Keyword | New CPC |
|---|---|
| Chips | $1.05 |
| Snacks | $0.37 |
| Healthy Snacks | $0.65 |
These keywords already proved themselves in the automated campaign: shoppers clicked them and bought through them. This list is what you will enter into Instacart in the next phase.
Phase 3 of 4 · Steps 15-34 · 20 steps
Before the manual campaign goes live, pause the automated one in Instacart.
Running both at once leads to clashes between them, and you would have no clean way to judge the new setup.
Pausing is reversible. If the manual campaign underperforms, restart the automated one and nothing is lost.
On the main Instacart Ads screen, click:
Create Campaign
Name the campaign anything that helps you find it later.
For the campaign objective, select:
Maximize Sales
This is the objective used in the video.
Next, choose the campaign scope. Select:
Instacart Ads Ecosystem
An ecosystem campaign can show your ad at any retailer on Instacart that carries your product, whenever a nearby shopper searches one of your keywords.
The other scope, partner-specific ads, targets only the retailers you choose. In the video, its minimum bid is $1, compared with $0.30 for the ecosystem. This guide stays with the ecosystem because that is where the automated campaign's data came from.
Choose:
Sponsored Products
In the video, it is the only ad format available for an ecosystem campaign.
For the first test, set a daily budget of:
$50 to $100 per day
In the example, the campaign starts at:
$50 per day
A modest budget limits the damage if something in the setup is wrong. Later, Peter recommends raising it to at least $100 per day. His view is that Instacart's algorithm takes the size of the daily budget into account when it evaluates keyword auctions, so a bigger budget puts you in a better position.
If you have already paused the automated campaign, start the new one the same day. That is what Peter does in the video.
If you are building the campaign for a promotion, pick the date it should start.
Under bidding, do not choose:
Optimized
Instead select:
Manual
This is the critical switch.
From here on, you set the keywords and the bids. Once you select Manual, the remaining bidding options disappear and you move on to the ad group screen.
Create a new ad group and name it after the product it will advertise, for example:
Chips
Select one product. Several products in one ad group blur which product each keyword is selling. The recommended structure is:
one product per ad group
It is the same rule as in Step 2, applied from the start.
Even in a manual campaign, Instacart does not limit your ads to the keywords you enter. It also suggests keywords it thinks you missed, and all of them use the default maximum CPC bid. At the start, set it to:
$0.30
That keeps Instacart's suggestions at the minimum bid, so the keywords you chose and priced get the most attention. The suggested keywords can earn a bigger role later in the campaign.
Go back to your sheet and copy the keywords for the product you are setting up. Copy only the keyword column for now. The bids come in Step 28.
Paste the list into the keyword field and click:
Add Keywords
Your keywords now appear in the ad group, each with its own bid field.
Find the first keyword's New CPC in your sheet, copy it, and paste it into the bid field next to that keyword in Instacart.
Repeat for each keyword, one at a time:
In the setup screen shown in the video, each bid has to be pasted in by hand. It is slow work, and it is where your campaign gets its precision.
Compare the Instacart screen with your sheet. Make sure:
A bid pasted into the wrong row overpays for one keyword and underbids another, so this check is worth the time.
For every other product:
Continue until every product has its own ad group.
With ad groups, products, keywords, and bids in place, click:
Next
Instacart opens a review screen.
Before you launch, verify:
If everything matches, click:
Launch
Your manual campaign is live.
Phase 4 of 4 · Steps 35-42 · 8 steps
Do not make major changes immediately.
You probably launched partway through the day, so Day 1 holds only a few hours of data. In Peter's experience, on Day 2 the campaign is still warming up while Instacart's algorithm evaluates it.
Give the campaign:
2 to 3 days
before you judge its first results.
After those first days, go back to the keyword report. Look at:
The first manual setup is a starting point. The next four steps turn it into a routine.
For every keyword whose bid you lowered, ask:
If ROAS went up and sales held, the new bid is doing its job.
A keyword that suddenly loses traffic after a bid cut has probably dropped out of most of its auctions. Raise its bid in small steps until its clicks recover, even if that costs a little ROAS.
For every keyword whose bid you raised, ask:
A higher bid pays off only when the extra visibility brings enough additional sales.
Based on what you see:
Treat bidding as a routine. Manual bidding gives you more control, and that control pays off only if you keep using it.
The full process becomes:
Export → Analyze → Adjust → Run → Review → Adjust Again
Each round teaches you more about which combination of:
SKU + keyword + bid
produces the best results for your products.
This approach replaces one broad automated setup with decisions you make yourself, product by product and keyword by keyword, using data your account already holds.
That gives you control over how much you spend, where you spend it, and what return you expect from each keyword.
Use this list to check your work before and after launch:
The two videos above show every step inside Instacart, from exporting the keyword report to launching the manual campaign.
They are part of the RMIQ Retail Media Academy, which covers practical ways to improve retail media performance at the SKU and keyword level.
For a result from campaigns RMIQ runs end to end, see Darey Brands. RMIQ ran each SKU of its Green Valley Lactose Free brand on Instacart as its own AI-optimized campaign, and in under 2 months ROAS rose 75% and attributed sales grew 2.5x.
Reach beyond the marketplace
Instacart campaigns can reach shoppers on other retailers' sites and on carts in stores, and off-platform campaigns take Instacart's audiences to social and streaming platforms.
More than 310 grocers, marketplaces and commerce platforms run Carrot Ads, Instacart's ad technology, on their own sites, among them Hy-Vee. Gopuff announced in September 2026 that it will use Carrot Ads, and Bottlecapps said in 2025 it would bring it to more than 1,300 alcohol retailers. A campaign scoped to the Instacart Ads ecosystem can serve on these sites. The Media Rating Council extended its accreditation to Carrot Ads placements in November 2025.
Shoppable display campaigns that use keywords or Optimized performance extend to Caper Cart screens automatically. An impression counts once an ad has been on screen for one second. Video does not run on carts, cart results are not reported separately, and cart impressions fall outside the MRC accreditation.
Instacart audiences and sales measurement are available on Google, Meta, NBCUniversal, Pinterest, Roku, The Trade Desk, TikTok and YouTube. Pinterest self-service opened to all Instacart brand partners in the second quarter of 2026, and in October 2025 Instacart announced a TikTok Ads Manager integration for select advertisers.
Putting formats together
Instacart's own data supports adding display to sponsored products: on average, 50% of the shoppers reached by a brand's display ad were not reached by that brand's sponsored products, and more than 33% of new-to-brand sales from display came from shoppers the sponsored products missed.
Build ad groups around products that share searches, price and margin, so one keyword fits every product in the group. RMIQ's method goes further and gives each important product (SKU) its own ad group; see the Darey Brands case study and the Smash Kitchen case study. We keep one always-on campaign per product line and add seasonal campaigns on top. Avoid running identical optimized campaigns for the same products at the same time.
Instacart's ad revenue is seasonally highest in the fourth quarter and lowest in the first, which suggests competition for holiday searches is strongest late in the year. For Thanksgiving 2027, on Thursday, November 25, we suggest working back with a buffer: products claimed and Pages approved by mid-October, display creative submitted two weeks before its start date, and optimized campaigns live by early November so learning ends well before the peak. Easter 2027 falls on March 28, in Instacart's quietest quarter. For budget splits across networks, see how to plan your retail media budget for 2027.
| Category | What to know | Where to start | Evidence |
|---|---|---|---|
| Food | Recipes put your products into meal plans and reach shoppers outside your aisle | Recipe ads, then sponsored products | JBSS's holiday sponsored recipe: $3.12 ROAS, 67% of attributed sales new to brand (Instacart case study, 2025) |
| Seafood and pantry | Display can win new buyers in a crowded aisle | Shoppable display | Wild Planet: new-to-brand purchases up 54%, share up 2 points (Tinuiti, 2025) |
| Pet | Instacart says it is the only online marketplace with all five of the top U.S. pet retailers | Shoppable video with promotions | Reveal Pet Food: double-digit ROAS on shoppable video (Instacart, 2024) |
| Alcohol | Ads run only where Instacart determines alcohol advertising is permitted, under strict creative rules | Sponsored products, then Carrot Ads on alcohol retailers or Meta | Molson Coors on Meta: 4.2x ROAS in two weeks, 65% new to brand (Instacart, 2024) |
| Beverage | AI-built landing pages gave one early adopter more attributed sales | Pages with display | Celsius: campaign-attributed sales up 20% with AI landing pages (Instacart, 2025) |
The third column is our suggestion; the evidence comes from each brand's case study. Alcohol creative may not show excessive or underage drinking, and weight-loss products are not accepted.
Measurement
Instacart's closed-loop attribution counts a sale when a shopper buys within 14 days of clicking a sponsored product, or of seeing or clicking a display, video or recipe ad. When several ads touch one purchase, credit is split evenly among them by default. Since April 2025, when a path mixes clicks and views, only the clicks share the credit. You can compare this linear model with last-touch credit in reports; see multi-touch attribution.
Return on ad spend depends on your category, promotions and the attribution rules above. Pacvue's benchmarks show Instacart's sponsored product ROAS up 7.9% year over year in the second quarter of 2026. Instacart counts click-through rate against viewable impressions, and its ads page cites a Pacvue and Helium 10 report from the fourth quarter of 2024 that puts Instacart's CTR at twice that of the next major platform. In our September 2026 benchmarks, RMIQ-managed campaigns averaged 5.0x ROAS and a 2.11% CTR; our Instacart Ads benchmarks explain the method.
Generous rules produce generous numbers. The agency Acadia said in 2023 that it had seen ad-attributed sales on Instacart reach "north of 75%", which it called likely too high, and suggested watching market share as well; the Insights Center shows yours next to ROAS. To test what your ads add, Instacart offers A/B tests and sales lift tests, and Data Hub, its clean room, is in pilot; for a brand-level example, see the I Eat My Greens case study.
How it compares
Brands usually weigh Instacart against Amazon, the largest retail media network, and Google, where Instacart offers brands Shopping ads with its targeting as an off-platform channel.
| Instacart Ads | Amazon Ads | Google Ads | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Advertising revenue, 2025 | $1,065M (advertising and other) | $68.6B | $294.7B |
| Search keyword matching | Exact only, no negatives (sponsored products) | Broad, phrase, exact and negatives | Broad, phrase, exact and negatives |
| Auction | Second price (sponsored products), first price (display) | A form of second price, with reserve prices | You pay what beats the ad below you |
| Default attribution | 14 days, linear across ads | 7 or 14 days, last touch | 30 days, data-driven |
Sources: Instacart, Amazon and Alphabet 10-Ks for 2025; Instacart and Google help documentation; Amazon's statement on its auction; Intentwise's summary of Amazon attribution.
Because each network credits sales differently, a ROAS from one does not compare with a ROAS from another. Instacart's advantages are purchase data from grocery baskets across more than 2,200 banners and one campaign that reaches Carrot Ads sites and store carts; its limits are exact-match-only keywords and no negatives on sponsored products. Compare further in our Amazon Ads guide, Walmart Connect guide, Target Roundel guide, the Amazon Ads and Walmart Connect network profiles, and the retail media guide.
Pre-flight
Progress is saved in this browser only.
Asked often
Brands bid in auctions to show products and ads in Instacart search results, aisles and the home page, and on retailer sites and in stores that use Instacart's ad technology. Sponsored products are paid per click; display and video per thousand impressions.
Request an account at ads.instacart.com, add users and billing, and claim your products in the Library. Then create a campaign in Instacart Ads Manager: choose an objective and Scope, set the budget and bidding, add products and keywords, and launch.
There is no minimum spend. Sponsored products are paid per click, and RMIQ-managed campaigns averaged $0.53 per click in our September 2026 benchmarks; display ads are paid per thousand impressions, where bids start at $15. Optimized bidding needs at least $20 a day.
It is Instacart's self-serve tool for creating, bidding on and reporting on campaigns. Brands and agencies use it, and since May 2026 retailers can run promotions in it too.
They can be: there is no minimum spend, and new accounts can earn a $300 click credit. Instacart said mid-market and emerging brands grew their ad spend especially fast in early 2026. Start with sponsored products on a few well-stocked products.
Instacart is smaller and grocery-focused, with exact-match keywords only on sponsored products and a 14-day linear attribution model. Amazon offers more match types and negative keywords and credits the last ad touched.
It depends on your category, promotions and Instacart's 14-day attribution. Pacvue reported Instacart sponsored product ROAS up 7.9% year over year in the second quarter of 2026, and RMIQ-managed Instacart campaigns averaged 5.0x ROAS and a 2.11% click-through rate in our September 2026 benchmarks.
Display banners are 3200 pixels wide, at 4:1 for mobile and 8:1 for desktop, and the shoppable display image is 16:9 with a tagline of up to 29 characters. Shoppable video runs 3 to 30 seconds at 16:9.
Yes. Campaigns can extend to retailer sites that use Carrot Ads, such as Gopuff, to Caper Carts in stores, and to partners such as Pinterest, Meta and TikTok through off-platform campaigns.
Contact RMIQ
Book 30 minutes with Petr, or send the team a message. A person on the team reads both.
Petr Misek, Retail Media Expert
Bring the brands you sell and the networks you buy on. Petr will show you where RMIQ fits and what it would change.
Petr, Jim or Jacek will reply
Pricing, partnerships, press, or a question that doesn't need a call.
Petr MisekRetail media expert, RMIQ
Questions about your retail media? Book 30 minutes with Petr, or send the team a message. A person on the team reads both.
Book 30 minutes Send a message
