In our News & New Releases series we’ll be sharing information about product releases and new features built by the Instacart Ads team, as well as any news that might be of interest to our brand partners. 

Introducing Daily Budgets

In this article, we look at a new budget setting available for Featured Product ad campaigns which enables advertisers to set daily budgets for their campaigns, as well as an optional lifetime budget cap for the campaign. This new budget setting can be used to control ad spend while leaving enough flexibility for the Instacart Ads platform to vary ad spend during busier times on the Instacart marketplace. 

Introducing Daily budget 

We are releasing a new budget setting — Daily budget — for Featured Product ad campaigns. When selected, advertisers can specify a budget that they want their campaign to spend, on average, each day.

This highly requested functionality ensures you never spend more than double your daily budget on a given day and that over the course of a month your ad spend averages out to be no more than your daily budget.   

You can also set a lifetime spending limit for your ad campaign and an end date and the ads platform stops your campaign when either your campaign spends up to its lifetime cap or it reaches the end date, whichever comes first. Both of these features are optional, giving advertisers the ability to keep their campaigns “always on” without a lifetime cap or end date if they would like.

How does it work?

When creating or editing campaigns, you can select the new Daily Budget option from the Budget settings section and then specify your average daily budget. And that’s it. You can optionally click Add campaign lifetime spending limit and then specify the lifetime cap for the ad campaign. 

Once you finish creating your ad campaign, or saving your edits, you have set the amount you want to spend on your Featured Product ad campaign each day. While the platform may spend above or below the budget on different days, depending on how busy the marketplace is, it will not spend more than this amount, on average, over the course of a month. It will also rollover unspent budget on any given day to the next, up until the end of the month — so on Monday if your campaign has leftover daily budget, on Tuesday the campaign will spend the daily budget plus Monday’s leftover budget.  

What’s the benefit of using it?

Daily budgets offer advertisers focused control over their Featured Product ad spend with increased flexibility. Previously, to approximate a daily budget, advertisers could set a date range and lifetime budget for their campaigns which the platform would then pace relatively evenly over the course of the campaign. 

Now, advertisers can directly specify their daily budget. Because this is more direct, it’s easy to specify new daily budgets, adjusting and tweaking as often as required. For example, an advertiser could use the new functionality to increase their daily budgets for the week leading up to Thanksgiving in an attempt to capture more of the increased traffic on the Instacart marketplace and then decrease the daily budget after the holiday has passed. 

Daily budgets offer this more direct control and flexibility while still controlling ad spend so budgets are used evenly, like the paced spending budget setting they are replacing.  

Where do I learn more?

Interested in learning more about Instacart Ads? Or ready to start advertising on the Instacart marketplace? Great! Sign up here to get started. 

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.