How to Get the Most Out of Optimized Bidding

Instacart ads products support a full-funnel marketing approach and enable advertisers to reach consumers all along their shopping journey — from awareness to consideration to purchase. Advertisers looking for targeted advertising use sponsored product ads to place ads for the products consumers are searching for, right at the point of purchase. We’ve written previously about the importance of getting your products into one of the top three placements. To consistently win these placements, advertisers were encouraged to enter strong bids and act quickly on budget recommendations provided by Ads Manager. While this is still true, with the new release of optimized bidding, which determines and automatically sets the optimal bid to generate the largest-possible expected sales revenue your budget can afford, you no longer have to manually set or adjust bids. 

To get the most out of this feature, there are several other best practices to follow which we’ll look at in this article. 

Enable optimized bidding

First and foremost, we encourage you to start running optimized bidding campaigns to optimize your sales performance. This can mean switching some of your existing sponsored products campaigns from manual bidding over to optimized bidding or you can create new daily budget ad campaigns that use optimized bidding. 

Either way, with optimized bidding enabled on your campaigns, you’ll start to see the results for yourself. 

Once you’re comfortable with the returns optimized bidding campaigns bring, we’d recommend enabling it for all your campaigns. To fully reap the benefits, follow the best practices outlined below on all your optimized bidding campaigns.

Fund campaigns with ample daily budgets

Our algorithms powering optimized bidding will automatically optimize your bids for the largest-possible expected sales revenue, provided your campaign has a sufficient daily budget. It needs a sufficient budget in order to capitalize on enough of the opportunities which can arise throughout a given day to make a real difference to your sales. Check our budget recommendations for each of your optimized bidding campaigns in the recommendations sections of Ads Manager. 

To capture the most sales value, we recommend starting with a daily budget higher than $20 a day to ensure the campaign has enough budget for the algorithm to optimize for you to get the most sales. While campaigns with a daily budget higher than $100 will optimize faster for more sales.

Optionally set a minimum ROAS goal

For best guidance and results, follow the minimum return on ad spend (ROAS) recommendations in Ads Manager. We recommend starting with a conservative minimum ROAS goal. Your minimum ROAS goal is not your target ROAS, and should be the lowest possible ROAS you’re willing to accept at the campaign level, as the algorithm will always aim to achieve the highest ROAS possible. For example, setting a minimum ROAS goal of 2 means that our algorithm will aim to achieve the highest ROAS possible for your campaign (e.g. 6x), while never going under 2x.

Avoid frequently pausing campaigns 

The algorithms powering optimized bidding take into account many factors. Optimized bidding aims to maximize your campaign auction participation throughout the day. 

Frequently pausing campaigns during the day or dayparting can hinder the effectiveness of our predictions, reducing the benefits and performance of optimized bidding significantly. 

Allow time for the algorithm to adjust 

Allow at least one week for the algorithm to optimize all aspects of your campaign and find the optimal bid. 

Work with your Instacart representative

And finally, the last word on getting the most out of optimized bidding is to work with your Instacart representative. If you have questions about optimized bidding, are interested in learning more about the impact it can have on your campaigns, or would like to walk through setting up optimized bidding on some of your campaigns, please reach out.

You can also review this overview video on sponsored product ads.

Instacart

Instacart is the leading grocery technology company in North America, partnering with more than 1,400 national, regional, and local retail banners to deliver from more than 80,000 stores across more than 14,000 cities in North America. To read more Instacart posts, you can browse the company blog or search by keyword using the search bar at the top of the page.