Instacart Ads build: catalogue, banners, campaigns

On Instacart you are advertising a retailer's shelf hour by hour, so the campaign sits downstream of the item feed. This build starts in the catalogue: we match your UPCs against every banner where you hold distribution, and on a first pass we usually find eight to fifteen percent of items unmatched, attached to the wrong brand page, or live in banners you do not ship to. Those are corrected or excluded before a bid goes up, because a click on an item the shopper's store cannot fill becomes a replacement in somebody else's favour. Catalogue and availability: UPC-level match audit across your banner set. Brand pages consolidated where size and flavour variants have split into separate entities. Found rate and replacement behaviour pulled per banner, with exclusion rules written for banners where availability is too thin to advertise into. This part is unglamorous and it is where the first month of return usually comes from. Choosing banners: The banner that owns the basket in Tampa is not the one that owns it in Denver. We cross-reference your shipment or distributor data against banner coverage by market and buy where the item is genuinely on shelf, not where the platform's reach figures are largest. Banners below your distribution threshold are switched off and stay off, including when the retailer's team asks why. How the campaigns are built: Sponsored product structured by basket role — restock items and discovery items do not share a bidding logic, a keyword book or a budget. Fixed bids per item until there is enough conversion volume for the platform's optimised bidding to have something to learn from, and we say when that threshold is met rather than switching it on at launch because it is there. Promotions: Instacart coupons come out of your margin, so we model redemption cost against the incremental basket before recommending one. We will not put a standing discount in front of a household that already buys you weekly, and if someone has been doing that we will show you what it cost. Measurement: The default fourteen-day post-click window is a reporting convention, not a finding. We report new-to-brand share, basket penetration and repeat rate at banner level, and we do not add Instacart-attributed sales to any other network's attributed sales and call the result a total. What you receive: The built account inside your own seats. A catalogue exception list naming the item, the banner, what is wrong and who can change it. A banner map by market. A ninety-day flight plan with the reasoning attached per banner. A working session with whoever runs it after we leave. Not included: We do not correct item data inside the retailer's own systems; that sits with you, your broker or the retailer's category team, and we tell you which. We do not manage fulfilment, packaging or third-party logistics. We do not take a second brand in your category on your banners while this engagement is live. Who this is not for: Brands whose distribution is thin enough that Instacart is a shop window rather than a sales channel. Brands treating Instacart as the whole e-commerce plan rather than one shelf among several. Anyone who wants an open-ended monthly arrangement from day one — this is a build with a handover, and we continue into a running retainer only when the first read gives a reason to.