It may be 2025, but most brands are still sleeping on Instacart.
Despite being one of the largest online grocery platforms in the U.S. and offering one of the most advanced retail media ecosystems in the space, Instacart remains underutilized.
Many brands continue to view it as a bottom-funnel tool — a place to capture “emergency diaper” purchases, rather than a platform for building long-term brand value.
We still hear the same question from brand teams:
“I’m already on Target and Walmart — what else can Instacart really do for me?”
The short answer? A lot.
In fact, if you know how to use it, Instacart could be your biggest untapped growth lever.
Instacart’s Growth Is Real
Instacart is maturing. In 2024, it captured 21.6% of all online grocery sales in the U.S. — more than double its 2019 share of 10.2%.
That means $1 in every $5 spent on online groceries now flows through Instacart.
At the same time, Instacart's ad business is scaling:
- $1.45B in projected ad revenue for 2025
- A 163% increase from 2021 to 2025
- Average 27.5% annual growth in ad revenue
Despite this momentum and Instacart’s clear effort to position itself as a performance-driven ad partner, adoption of key capabilities like behavioral targeting, display/video creative, and full-funnel measurement remains surprisingly low among brands.
But why is that, and why are brands still leaving the first-mover advantage on the table?
What Brands Get Wrong
Most brands still don’t treat Instacart like the distinct channel it is.
Too often, it’s grouped in with traditional retailers like Walmart and Target, as if the same rules, structures, and strategies apply.
But Instacart isn’t a retailer. It’s a marketplace intermediary with a fundamentally different business model, and that difference matters.
Because Instacart sits between the shopper and the store, and now increasingly between the brand and the broader media ecosystem, it operates under a different set of incentives.
It doesn’t control in-store execution or own the margin structure. Instead, it’s motivated to prove its value to brands through transparency, measurement, and performance.
That middle-ground position has pushed Instacart to invest heavily in tools like Share of Digital Shelf, Halo Sales, and behavioral attribution — all designed to close historic gaps in visibility and prove the impact of media spend.
The result? A platform that’s arguably more brand-friendly than some of the retailers themselves.
Two Approaches: Which One Are You Using?
Most brands fall into one of two camps, and the difference isn’t just in how they run campaigns, but how they define success.
Approach 1: Bottom-of-Funnel Only
This is the default for many advertisers. It focuses exclusively on high-intent moments, capturing shoppers who already know what they want and are ready to check out.
Campaigns often revolve around sponsored products with little structure, minimal segmentation, and a singular obsession: ROAS.
It works, to a point.
But it doesn't build brand affinity, drive new-to-brand acquisition, or shape category presence over time. Worse, it assumes that brand discovery and loyalty-building will happen elsewhere.
Most Instacart accounts we audit look like this:
- Products are lumped into a single campaign
- No segmentation by objective (e.g., awareness vs. conversion)
- Keyword harvesting runs unchecked
- No use of sponsored display or video formats
- Over-reliance on ROAS, ignoring broader strategy
Approach 2: Full-Funnel Execution
Brands that approach Instacart as a strategic retail media channel and not just a transaction tool are building stronger, more sustainable outcomes.
They’re layering creative, targeting, and measurement into campaigns built around intent, behavior, and brand lifecycle.
This approach recognizes that Instacart isn’t just a place to close the sale, but a place to shape the decision before the shopper even types in a brand name.
And Instacart gives you everything you’d need to run a full-funnel:
- Creative placements
- Behavioral audiences
- Check-out impulse campaigns
- Real-time performance data
And it’s all in the same console.
A full-funnel strategy accepts that purchase is one of several touchpoints, and winning on Instacart requires influencing more than the final click.
How Audience Targeting Options Can Make Instacart a Full-Funnel Channel
One of Instacart’s most powerful and overlooked capabilities is its native audience targeting.
Built directly into the ad console and modeled after Amazon DSP-style segmentation, these tools allow brands to create highly specific behavioral audiences across the entire funnel, without minimum spend thresholds or separate buying platforms.
This means brands can run sophisticated, full-funnel campaigns without needing to plug into an external DSP or license third-party data.
This is an absolute game-changer, especially for smaller brands. You can do what Amazon DSP does: audience layering, engagement tracking, loyalty segmentation, right inside the native tool.
Here's how targeting can be mapped across the funnel:
- Awareness
You don’t know us, but you will = Target users who interacted with the category but haven’t bought your brand.
INTERACTED with Category in the last 30 days + NOT BOUGHT your brand in the last 30 days.
- Consideration/Competitor
You are in the game, but you deserve better = Shoppers who bought the category, but not your brand.
BOUGHT Category in the last 30 days + NOT BOUGHT our brand in the last 60 days.
- Purchase
You don’t want to miss out on this, let me remind you of us = People who engaged with your brand but haven’t purchased.
INTERACTED with your brand in the last 30 days + NOT BOUGHT your brand in the last 30 days.
- Loyalty
You can forget your shopping list, but not us - Past buyers who haven’t re-purchased recently.
BOUGHT your brand in the last 60 days + NOT BOUGHT your brand in the last 30 days (based on product life).
Behavior shortcuts are also a good starting point. But for real impact, build custom audiences and align them with creative, landing pages, and funnel goals.
These segments can be refined further by store, region, recency, or product behavior, giving brands precision normally reserved for more mature platforms.
In audits, we still see most brands defaulting to keyword-based targeting alone, leaving these behavioral signals on the table.
The advantage is especially sharp right now. As Amazon continues transitioning its Vendor Central support teams, many sellers are finding themselves without the help they’ve relied on to manage pricing, inventory, or content updates.
In that gap, Instacart’s self-service, full-funnel targeting becomes an even smarter bet, especially for challenger brands trying to punch above their weight.
The brands that are winning on Instacart aren’t just bidding on keywords; they’re orchestrating journeys: introducing products to the right shoppers, nurturing intent, and reinforcing loyalty, all with audience segments that used to require a full-blown DSP.
Creative Is a Big Missed Opportunity
While most brands default to sponsored products, Instacart has dramatically expanded its creative toolbox over the past 18 months:
- Sponsored Video
- Display
- Shoppable Display,
- Universal Campaigns
Most ad capabilities are underutilized, leading to an opportunity for lower cost.
The brands that are investing in creative are getting premium placements and lower CPCs simply because no one else is bidding.
Above: On Amazon, there’s meaningful competition on relevant keywords, due to surgical targeting and higher CPCs. On Instacart, larger brands are spraying and praying
Instacart Brand Pages are also an opportunity. Unlike on Amazon, there is no organic discovery path to these landing experiences. They are only accessible through paid media like Sponsored Display and Video. That makes it even more critical to integrate them into your creative strategy.
Done well, Brand Pages allow you to:
- Align campaign goals with seasonal events and specific audiences
- Build conversion-focused experiences around themes like “game day” or “back to school.”
- Curate product bundles, showcase lifestyle content, and reinforce brand equity
Seasonal Brand Pages have been shown to outperform evergreen ones across key metrics — higher ad-to-cart rates, better conversion rates, and stronger NTB performance.
You can even build multiple landing experiences tailored to specific audiences, events, or moments in the shopper journey.
Instacart is rewarding creative investment with better placements, richer attribution (Halo Sales, NTB, Share of Shelf), and more shopper control.
This isn’t about aesthetics, it’s about strategy. If you’re still only running sponsored products, you’re giving up visibility, experience, and category share to someone else.
The Data to Prove It Works
One of Instacart’s most compelling advantages is the clarity of its data. In fact, this is the only retail platform that gives you first-party, real-time category performance data.
This level of insight typically requires third-party tools on Amazon (like Helium 10 or Pacvue) or doesn’t exist at all on Walmart and Target.
In contrast to other platforms that often stop at ROAS and CPCs, Instacart offers a full stack of brand-level insights, helping advertisers understand not just how their ads are performing, but how those ads are shifting brand presence in the category.
This is one of the only platforms where you can see how your creative moved your share of shelf, not just your sales. You can connect the dots between a campaign and your actual position in the aisle.
The most powerful tools include:
Share of Digital Shelf
This dashboard lets you monitor your brand’s visibility compared to competitors in real time.
You can track changes at the category and subcategory level, including anonymized (but often obvious) benchmarks of who’s gaining or losing share.
This enables what many retail media platforms still can’t offer: a way to tie media investment to market position, not just transaction data.
Category Insights
Goes beyond your own campaign performance to show:
- Sales lift by category
- New-to-Brand acquisition
- Product-level movement
- Cross-retailer visibility
Together, these tools give advertisers a multi-dimensional view of performance, essential when determining not only where to spend, but where to pivot.
Case Study
One strong example here at Acadia is a pharmaceutical brand we support across SEO, PPC, Analytics, Integrated Media, and Retail Media — including Instacart, Amazon DSP, Walmart, Target, and more. With so many platforms and stakeholders competing for budget, we needed a data-driven way to prioritize investment.
The initial challenge was balancing multiple categories across platforms while reacting to real-time demand shifts.
The solution came through Instacart’s Share of Digital Shelf and Category Insights tools.
These allowed us to monitor ad performance by category and track shifts in demand.
For example, while the brand had planned to pivot away from Category A early in Q1, the Instacart data showed a strong opportunity in Category B, especially through rising share of voice.
This insight led us to extend our focus on Category B, which helped drive a +19% YoY sales lift in Q1.
Acadia’s role was analyzing the cross-platform data, identifying where Instacart showed the highest potential, and using that to guide strategic budget shifts, ultimately aligning retail media investments with real-time consumer behavior.
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And it’s not just digital sales being captured. Instacart has published results from several in-store impact studies, showing that on-platform ads often drive double-digit sales lifts in physical retail, even when the final purchase happens off-platform.
This is a crucial insight: the influence of retail media goes far beyond last-click attribution.
And Instacart is one of the few platforms making that influence visible, particularly through Halo Sales, which track the ripple effect of ads on organic conversions and retail-wide lift.
When brands run full-funnel campaigns with strong creative and precise targeting, the impact is clear:
| Bottom-Funnel Only | 24% |
| Full-Funnel | 76% |
That’s nearly a 3x improvement in incrementality. So yes, full-funnel matters.
In short: the broader your strategy, the more of your true impact you’ll be able to measure and the more effectively you can optimize spend.
That makes Instacart not just a performance channel, but a real-time feedback loop for your overall retail media mix.
Where Does the Shopper’s Journey Begin?
If you’re still on the fence, let’s go back to the beginning of this article for a second.
“I’m already on Target and Walmart — what else can Instacart do for me?”
We invite you to ask yourself this question first: Where does the shopper’s journey begin?
Because if the answer is Instacart (and for over 20% of online grocery transactions, it is), then your brand needs to be there from the start.
If someone opens the Instacart app, they’re not in Walmart. They’re not on Amazon. They’re in Instacart’s universe. Even if the final transaction happens at a Walmart store, you had no influence if you weren’t part of the Instacart path.
That’s what many brands miss: Instacart is the place where intent forms, lists are built, and purchase decisions are shaped. If you’re not present in that moment, not just on the digital shelf, but in the discovery and decision layers, you’re not competing.
What We’re Excited to See in the Future
With a robust ad platform already in place, we believe the focus in 2025 is on expansion, automation, and intelligence.
Here’s what our predictions are and what we’re excited to see soon:
1. AI-Powered Search and Discovery
Instacart is actively integrating AI-driven experiences to reshape how shoppers explore products, similar to Amazon’s “Rufus.”
This includes contextual discovery through:
- Natural language queries (e.g., “healthy school lunch ideas”)
- Product suggestions based on dietary or household needs
- AI-curated shoppable collections and dynamic recipes
This shift means the traditional keyword model is evolving, and the brands that show up in these context-driven experiences will need optimized PDPs, rich creative, and robust metadata to stay visible.
2. Recipe and Occasion Targeting
Instacart is placing strategic bets on shoppable inspiration content, particularly through recipes and occasion-based landing pages.
That means media budgets will soon be able to target not just what people are buying, but why, creating new layers of relevance for CPGs and food brands.
Your ad might not just show up in a search; it could become part of the ingredient list.
Expect to see formats that let you sponsor recipe cards, seasonal bundles, or curated lists based on common pantry gaps.
3. Advanced Controls Are on the Horizon
Based on advertiser demand, Instacart is actively building more campaign-level controls, including features like:
- Keyword pausing
- More granular reporting by placement
- Budget pacing by funnel stage or audience type
These refinements will give brands more levers to manage spend surgically — and make Instacart’s ad console feel even more like a performance engine, not just a media extension.
The Bottom Line
What makes Instacart especially appealing is the combination of accessible tools, rich data, and structural incentives.
If you’re not leveraging its capabilities, your competitors will. Instacart’s algorithms will automatically fill the space you vacate, often with rivals' video, display, or category conquesting campaigns.
So the real bottom line is this: Instacart isn’t just about hitting lower-funnel targets anymore. It’s about shaping demand, capturing loyalty, and winning visibility when intent is forming.
The tools are ready. The audience is here. The CPCs are still low.
This isn’t just a place to spend. It’s a place to win.
But only if you move now.