Tinuiti is excited to announce that we now offer dayparting capabilities for Instacart advertising campaigns. We are one of a few Instacart API partners to offer dayparting on Instacart, and are actively testing the impact of the ad pacing tool for many of our current Instacart clients.
Instacart’s grocery sales skyrocketed from 2019 to 2020, due largely to the impact of COVID-19 related changes in how—and where—we shop. While that same percentage of growth isn’t likely to be repeated YoY in the near future, neither is a sharp decline in Instacart sales as we head toward a post-pandemic future. Shoppers enjoy the flexibility and convenience that Instacart offers, and many aren’t planning an in-person return to their neighborhood supermarket anytime soon.
Wondering if dayparting on Instacart is a smart fit for your brand? Let’s explore how it works, and why it’s such a crucial component of ensuring your ad dollars are spent wisely.
How does dayparting on Instacart work?
Similar to its function within other platforms, dayparting on Instacart enables advertisers to set specific days and hours during which their ads will run and not run. At Tinuiti, this is managed through our proprietary, AI-enabled ecommerce activation tool, MobiusX.
Within MobiusX, we are able to build comprehensive dayparting schedules, choosing the exact days, and hours of each day, that ads are to be automatically turned on or off. These ‘day parts’ are divided into 24 full-hour blocks (ie. 12am – 1am, 3pm – 4pm, etc.), with no minimum number of days—or hours within a day—that ads must be active.
The same dayparting schedule can be applied to all of your Instacart campaigns, a hand-picked selection of your campaigns, or a single campaign. We are also able to set-up schedules specific to upcoming holidays that will automatically run on that day only, reverting to the regularly scheduled ad delivery hours for that particular day the following week.
Advantages of Dayparting for Instacart Ads
Day parting allows advertisers to better pace their ad spend, ensuring their budget doesn’t run dry ahead of key shopping hours on Instacart. While Instacart hasn’t provided specific peak hours, they have shared that the highest number of sales occur “post-lunch.” Additionally, waiting for the weekend to grocery shop has gone out the window for many shoppers.
“I don’t think it’s widely understood just HOW much traffic there is on Instacart today and how many non-brand queries and new customers there are out there to reach. Because of this, it’s hard to budget for full coverage, so a feature like dayparting can help a brand be visible at key times, especially when competitors are low on budget or inventory later in the day.”
— Elizabeth Marsten, Senior Director of Strategic Marketplace Services at Tinuiti
Let’s explore a few ways that a dayparting schedule on Instacart can help expand your reach without increasing your budget:
- Budgets can be better optimized—and stretched—by focusing on the ad types that best fit the time of day they are delivered
- Ensuring that you have ad spend available during the hours that are most important for your particular products (and when competitors may have run out of budget!)
- Strategically advertising more heavily during high conversion-potential holidays, even if those holidays fall on days that aren’t typically your best performers. In example, if you sell hot dogs, potato chips, or hamburger buns, you’ll likely want to have your ads turned on for the full day on popular holidays for cookouts (ie. Memorial Day, Independence Day, Labor Day)
- Taking advantage of non-holiday specific trends in online grocery shopping, or complementary categories, as they apply to your product lineup. In example, if you’re advertising lip balm and body lotion on Instacart, you may want your ads to run for a higher number of hours than usual when a greater percentage of shoppers are experiencing harsh winter weather. Similarly, you may want to increase visibility for sunscreen and bottled water during a heat spell, or for a beauty product you offer that a popular celebrity was recently photographed using
Who offers dayparting capabilities for Instacart?
There are currently just 10 Instacart API partners, with Tinuiti being among the few of that 10 who have built out dayparting capabilities. We are actively testing dayparting on Instacart for a variety of clients across diverse industries to analyze the impact to efficiency metrics and sales.
For each client running dayparting campaigns on Instacart, we are measuring the pre-and-post-dayparting implementation impact to the following metrics:
- ROAS (return on ad spend)
- Sales
- AOV (average order value)
- CPA (cost per acquisition)
- Average CPC (cost per click)
- Clicks
- Impressions
Not yet active on Instacart, but ready to see how Instacart advertising can help grow your visibility and sales? Contact us today to learn more about our Instacart Acceleration Program, and get your cart rolling smoothly with no squeaky wheels!