Advertising on Instacart 101: The Key to Keywords

In the Advertising on Instacart 101 series, we introduce readers to Instacart Ads, look at some key concepts, and talk about the value they can provide brands of all sizes — from emerging challenger brands to the very largest category leaders.

In this article, we take a closer look at a key component of paid search advertising on the Instacart platform — keywords. We’ll describe how to bid on the keywords from different searches you want to specifically target and define the two types of keywords Instacart Ads tracks, default keywords and keyword overrides.

The importance of keywords in paid search advertising

Instacart Ads uses paid search advertising to put ads right in front of the consumer, directly at the point of purchase as they’re shopping from their favorite local retailer. We’ve talked about paid search advertising in detail in another article, which you can read here.

Keywords are critical to how paid search advertising works. Each keyword represents one of the search terms consumers might use when searching for products to buy on the Instacart platform.

So a customer looking to buy bread to make sandwiches might search for ‘bread’ or ‘sliced bread’, if they have a grain preference they might search for ‘whole wheat bread’ or ‘rye bread’ or ‘white bread’. Each search represents a keyword and in the search results for each, the Instacart platform displays Featured Product ads for the relevant campaigns with the winning bids.

The types of Instacart Ads keywords

Instacart Ads uses and tracks two types of keywords — default and keyword overrides.

Default keywords are those search terms relevant to one of the products you’re advertising on Instacart. When customers search for these keywords, your ads campaign automatically bids to have your product displayed in a Featured Product ad on the search results page, using the default maximum CPC bid you set.

Let’s quickly walk through an example. We’re advertising our whole wheat, sliced bread and have set a default maximum bid of $1.00. That means whenever a customer clicks on one of our Featured Product ads for our bread, we pay $1.00.

The Instacart platform knows what products are relevant to different search terms. How this works on Instacart is relatively complex and technical, but for our purposes it’s safe to say our whole wheat, sliced bread is relevant to searches for ‘whole wheat bread’, ‘bread’, and ‘sliced bread’.

When a customer searches for ‘whole wheat bread’ our ads campaign automatically bids to have our bread displayed in a Featured Product ad on the search results page. When this happens, Instacart Ads refers to ‘whole wheat bread’ as a default keyword.

After your campaign has been running for a while and has bid on some relevant search terms, Ads Manager starts to populate a list of default keywords —

It’s a good idea to pay attention to your default keywords as they might reveal search terms you hadn’t previously considered for a higher bid.

Keyword overrides are search terms, like default keywords, but with specific CPC bids for each, different from the default maximum CPC bid you’ve set. Typically keyword overrides are those search terms that you’ve identified as especially important to win.

So continuing our example about whole wheat sliced bread, we know that customers searching for whole wheat bread are more valuable to you than customers just searching for bread because a customer searching for whole wheat bread is more likely to buy the whole wheat, sliced bread than a customer just searching for bread.

Given that those customers are more valuable to you, you want to bid higher on those searches to give you a better chance of winning the auction. So we enter a keyword override bid of $1.50. When customers search for ‘whole wheat bread’ we automatically bid $1.50, not the default $1.00 bid, to win the auction and have your product displayed in a Featured Product ad on the search results page.

Keywords work!

By finding relevant customers to display your ads to based on the search terms they use while searching for products to buy, Instacart can put your product in front of the right customer, directly at the point of purchase.

Advertise with us to get in front of consumers when they’re searching for products like yours on the Instacart Marketplace. For more information and to get started, visit ads.instacart.com.