Learn how brands are leveraging first-party data from Instacart’s Customer Intelligence Platform to craft & improve their ad strategies.
Summary
Tapping into the potential of first-party online shopping data is easier said than done, but one marketplace making it easy for brands to uncover insights is Instacart. The Instacart Customer Intelligence Platform (ICIP) data includes what consumers are buying, how they find items, and trends over time, alongside brand-specific performance metrics. In this video, learn how brands are taking action on this valuable data in order to craft a more relevant, efficient, and impactful strategy on Instacart.
Key Takeaways
- 4 A’s ICIP will focus on in 2022- Access, Accuracy, Actionability, and Advanced Tools for effective opportunity identification segmentation.
- ICIP displays your share of categories to help you understand if you are outcompeting your competition where you are.
- Brands can understand exactly what makes consumers click “buy” by measuring statistics such as household penetration and basket penetration over time of millions of consumers on Instacart.
- Leverage ICIP data such as basket-affinity data out-of-stock rates to measure brand loyalty and address any supply chain issues to combat them immediately.
Transcript
Melissa Burdick
Okay, we have a quick 30 minutes today. I thought we would kick it off with some introductions, and then Brian is going to head into a quick presentation. We’ll do a panel and then a Q&A. So for folks who are joining us, if you wanna put your questions in the Q&A as we go throughout the presentation and we will get to them at the end, so feel free to enter into the Q&A section as you think of your questions but I’m Melissa Burdick President and co-founder of Pacvue, a partner of all these great people here on the phone, or webinar or whatever you want to call this thing. For those of us, this is probably our last webinar of 2021, I know a lot of us are probably pretty done with the year, so I can’t wait. So thank you all for joining us. I know this is a really great topic, I’m gonna introduce. So Molly Johannes, Todd Hassenfelt, and Brian Gillis, will you guys introduce yourselves really quickly. We’ll start with you Molly, then Todd, then Brian, what your role is, what you do, and then we’ll hand it over to Brian to start the presentation on ICIP, which you’ll have to stay until the Q&A to know what that stands for.
Molly Johannnes
Thanks Melissa, I’m Molly Johannnes, I’m a key account manager on Hinkle, I’m on our e-commerce team and lead our Instacart business, excited to be here.
Todd Hassenfelt
Thank you. Happy to be here, Todd Hassenfelt I’m the e-commerce director of growth, strategy and planning at Colgate Palmolive. We’re proud to be a top company for executive women and working moms, some of our brands besides Colgate and Palmolive include Hillscut Nutrition, Irish Spring, EltaMD Skin Care and Hello Product. You should follow Craig Ubitsky the Founder of Hello. He’s a great LinkedIn follow. If you’re interested, thank you for having me.
Brian Gillis
I’m Brian Gillis, Director of Insights at CBG at Instacart and my role, my remit is basically to make your lives easier and give you better access to insights so you can really understand how consumers shop online for groceries and whether your strategies are paying off on Instacart. I feel like that’s not a bad segue to my presentation Melissa. Alright, let’s hope this works. Okay, can someone let me know if they see my green screen? Perfect. Okay, so for those of you that have seen me present before I apologize, some of this might be a tad repetitive, but hopefully there’s some new learning in here, and we’ll get to the panel as soon as possible. I came to Instacart because the data asset is just unparalleled, as you probably know right now we have over 700 retail partners, 65000 stores, lots of shoppers, lots of coverage, and really unique data sets from retailers or verticals that aren’t typically data sharers.
Now, everyone relax, I’m not announcing that we’re gonna be retail data sharers, like retail specific next year, we are working on it, but everything is aggregated into total platform or… Okay, so we actually have really three sources of data, I like to talk about point-of sale data, where we work very, very hard over the last two years to put all of our UPCs into a standard taxonomy. We use the Nielsen and IRI, but we default to the Nielson Category hierarchy, and that’s live and up and running. So on POS data, we can tell people the distribution on our platform, how many stores they’re in, what stores they are not in, their sales, their growth, and of course their share. I’m big fan, lots of history in T-log data, where we’re building tools, not online, not on demand yet, to allow us to have conversations around loyalty or basket metrics, which I’m gonna talk to today, and availability data, which we’re just scratching the surface on because we derive all of the shopper data when they go into a store and they can’t find a part in the shelf, we record that in real time, we also record what was substituted…
So we have a wealth of information, we’re just starting to get around to dealing with. That’s a problem, I don’t know how to turn that off. Okay, we like to categorize what we do for our partners into three areas, leveraging POS data to answer questions like growth, distribution share what’s driving my share, conversion, things like brand conversion, hussle, penetration. We also do a lot of work on leveraging customer insights, diving into the basket strategies, investment or those driving conversion and keeping people in my brand, am I losing or gaining trial, etcetera, working on more of a new product launch evaluator, which were probably launch in H2 next year, and then as I said before, leveraging our insights to really figure what’s going on in store, which you’re gonna see more from us next year… I apologize, I’m not good at my computer today, how you access our insights is really one of four ways, and they’re concurrent and they really overlap each other, one is we now have a customer insights portal, you can access through ads manager. We have over 900 brands on that portal right now with about a 80% repeat engagement rate in that portal which I’ll show you in a second, you can get access to the sales units share over time.
We have a monthly reporting suite, which we’ve actually re-launched this month, where everything is clean, no more PDF reports, it’s all Excel-based, those are updated every month for about 1500 suppliers. We also have a team of about 35 people that do consulting, QBRs, work plan, deep dive ad hoc questions for some of our top partners, two of which are on with me today, and then we have data integration, which we do for a few partners, which is incorporating our data into… We have a couple of API feeds going on and lots of SFTP, highly interested in having those conversations with our partners to make it easier for you… A little bit of new news, the way you access our data is really through a tearing structure, I built this two years ago, because one… We just didn’t have the bandwidth to deal with 1500 suppliers or 2000-3000. So we had to be selective. Two we have a really rich data source in terms of our customer or CLOG/TLOG data that we feel like we would absolutely work hard to give that to partners, but you gotta be a partner really, which is an investment level of 5% or above, to access that data, we had a tiering system of five last year, we’re going into just a simple one of three, we do listen to feedback, we wanna make something very simple, much more democratic, or that want something that keeps up with our abilities to access more suppliers more vendors and more partners, and then we also want more data integration, so I know you’re reading it ahead of me, but basically there’s a freemium model, anybody, anybody investing even a dollar an Instacart is gonna be able to access full share growth and distribution metrics starting in middle of January, anyone spending over 5% is gonna be able to access through my team ’cause we haven’t converted into the portal yet, all of our customer insights, and then at a higher level, we’re working on the API data integration, including things like not found by store by identified store, so actually with the retailer name on it, by UPC, so all that’s in the works, but the big news is we’re getting much more democratic with open access starting in January.
The portal is up and running, as I say, with 900 brands right now, you can log in and you can get access to Sales unit share by week. We do listen to feedback, one of the things that we’re launching in the middle of January is UPC granularity that will be available… We’re also launching daily granularity that’ll be available I believe January 17th. And big news for people on CBC community, we’re allowing you to toggle between fiscal and calendar week. So right now, our platform is Sunday to Saturday, we’re gonna give the ability to go Monday to Sunday and match what is generally what I’m learning, most people’s fiscal week. So a custom time period, saved reports, please go in and experiment, this is a free service that everyone should be using, I think. Other things that we have available through my team and we’re working hard, I know there’s a lot of people I know very well in this crowd that are pushing me to to work even harder to get this access on demand, we’re not there yet, it’s a heavy engineering lift, but we do do things for our partners such as measure household penetration, basket penetration, and what I’m passionate about, brand conversion over time.
We have that at a very granular level across millions and millions of households. Two, we’re publishing a lot more, and this is a very fast tool now, basket affinity data, where you can go in and understand what else has bought on that purchase across millions of baskets and grocery online, three, personal favorite is we’re able to follow consumers longitudinally, so we can understand whether consumers you acquired one week, did they come back 12 weeks later, so did consumers lapse out of your brand, or are you able to maintain them? And where do they go? Did they exit the category completely, or did they go to a competitor? So that is available through my team at the moment, and then finally, we’re doubling down on cross-shop next year, we’ve added a tool, now we’ll give a brand, all of its cross-shops available to them, and so they can understand, if you’re Hershey, are you selling chocolate syrup with ice cream or ice cream and then the chocolate syrup. When you did a key event and you advertise more, did you drive that behavior or did it lag. And so we’re doing that across all brands for almost all of our partners, so you can really understand if your brand is a pasta was it bottled with pasta sauce or is that still an opportunity? Kind of basic, but with really, really quick implications of how you can change your ad strategies.
What are we working on for 2022? Number one, of course, is that tiers revamp. I know I only give you a preview, the sales teams are armed with all the materials, but it’s for access, we wanna be very democratic as fast as we can, we wanna be the place to learn about online shopping in the industry, we wanna be transparent, and we wanna leverage our advantage, which is near real-time data, it is updated every week, and in some cases with our API and our key files, it’s updated every day, so there’s no lag like a Nielson…
Two, Accuracy. We struggle with this for two years, we will continue to struggle with it, of making sure we map every single one of our four and a half million UPCs into the right place, we are open to help and open to changes, but right now we are tracking about… 91% of our sales volume, and we wanna work hard to close these other gaps, also for anyone on the line, we wanna launch this in Canada, it’s active right now, but we’ll be fully active by the end of Q1, and all of our insights that exist in the US will exist in Canada. The last two things, action ability, that’s huge feedback from the world out there is how can we link these to our ad performance, and things like brand conversion we’re working really hard on increased availability data, so you can literally send a case to a store that’s out of stock etcetera.
And then advanced tools. I walk you through there, we are launching for our tier one partners, source of volume, customer segmentation, and we are partnering with a few vendors on online consumer dishes and treats, so that’s what you can expect from me and my team in the upcoming year. That’s it.
Melissa
Awesome, awesome. Okay, so quick icebreaker to the group before we get into our panel is, did you guys see anything kind of interesting, weird consumer behavior purchases during covid or right after covid, Molly do you want to kick us off and then Brian do you want to tell us what ICIP stands for, ’cause I promised that to the group…
Molly
Okay, awesome. Yeah, one consumer behavior that we saw was really the impact of social media on purchase behavior during the peak of the pandemic, we own a brand called Borax, and a thing called laundry stripping went viral on tiktok, and we saw that brand take off. So it’s been really interesting to see the impact of that and how it translates to sales and retail.
Melissa
You might have to explain what laundry stripping means because… I did not know what that means.
Molly
So what you do is you put your clothes in the bathtub for your comforter, etcetera, and then you put Borax, powder deterrent and other things, and then you let it soak for a few hours, and what you get is a really gross bathtub water full of all the dirt and grime and stuff that was on your clothes, so super interesting, trend that took off during the pandemic.
Melissa
I wonder if we looked in the Instacart data, Bryan, if we would see liquid plumber also spiking… That’s what came to my mind. Todd, what about you?
Todd
I think just last week, it’s ironic, we’re here with Instacart today, but they launched something on LinkedIn where you can type in either a zip code or a city, and there’s 12 different fun facts including like if your city was a header behind the Feta TikTok Pasta Challenge, how much candy did your city buy, what’s your sister city that bought similar items, if you haven’t tried it, it’s really fun. We’ve been playing around with it internally, just see things, but a great tool and I found a lot of interesting nuggets on that one.
Melissa
Awesome. I have to check that out. Brian, what about you?
Brian
Our neat fact was that at the peak of COVID, over 25% of our orders were to a secondary address, and it’s usually moms buying for their parents. Anecdotal, but ICIP stands for… I chose this two years ago and I regret it, and if there’s any one good brand marketers in the room… I’m happy to take suggestions. But it stands for Instacart customer insights platform. It was aspirational because clearly we don’t have a fully built out platform, but we are gonna get there over time, so if you have any suggestions I’m open to it.
Melissa
Awesome, alright, well, feel free to put your name suggestions in the Q&A, we’ve got a really quiet audience because otherwise we’re just gonna keep hearing from us, which is fine too… Alright, so let’s get on to the questions, the first one is… So Molly first, and then Todd, how does this ICIP data help you? What did it… Are you leveraging the most in decisioning and are you uncovering more budget potentially… Because even more access to data. So Molly, are you gonna kick us off with maybe the answer to that one.
Molly
Yeah, for sure, there is a plethora of data that we get supplied through ICIP that we’re utilizing every day, and I think a couple of big ones that really pop to me that we utilize quite frequently was the affinity data that Brian mentioned, we definitely utilize that to start to understand what’s in the basket, understanding permissions for our consumers, and then how do we build that promotion behind it or partnerships across cpgs. The second one that we’ve really started to get behind is the, Item not found or the out of stock report. That’s been a hot one across the industry and understanding what your out of stock rate has been, paired with, your walk rate and how consumers at that point of decision at shelf, are choosing whether to stay within your portfolio or leave the category or go to competition so we found those to be extremely beneficial in our conversations internally with our brand teams and driving our Instacart business.
Melissa
Todd, what about you?
Todd
Yeah, just the… I agree with those. And to add on to the item, not found one, there is so much you can do with that, right, maybe you have a PDP issue where your title is confusing to Instacart shoppers, maybe it’s a reason for lower than expected sales for particular SKUs, if you’re looking at that, that you would have not had without the Instacart data, and then I think it’s great how Instacart not only gives you the out-of-stock rates or not found rate, but also then, did the shopper or the consumer via text, did they pick another one of your brands, a different skew of the same brand, or do they go to a complete different brand and you lose them altogether, so that can be kind of directional data to look at brand loyalty, you’ll encourage retailers to carry additional SKUs or if there’s any supply chain issues going on out there, you’ll have conversations about the importance of being in stock. I think some other ones while Brian alluded to, there’s not retailer data yet, but you do have regional data and you can look at that, and at least you can look at some of your regional grocers, you could be more surgical with the marketing or trade spend budget if you’re stronger in one region on Instacart but not another…
You can be a little bit more specific there with support tactics, like geo-based campaigns, and then I think the other one that’s kind of interesting is new to brand metrics, you can identify for people that are new to Instacart, did they come and buy your brand, so maybe what they did in brick and mortar, are they carrying over to Instacart, but also then existing ones that can kinda give you validation if your featured products are working, a delivery promotion gave you a halo effect, but these penetration reports, you’ll combine with a QBR reporting with the Instacart teams, you can figure out things like customer lifetime value, they’ll give you how many days in between purchases, so this is a lot of data you may not get elsewhere.
Melissa
Do you guys have any examples of some of those co-branding events or something that you might have done based on the data that you saw, a partnership or a promotion that you guys did based on it?
Todd
Yeah, in a previous life, I was previously at Simple Mills, there was a cross-promotion with Ithica hummus at last year’s Super Bowl, looking at some infinity data, but I think that affinity data is so helpful to find those in across promotions, and it does have success really connecting with consumers.
Melissa
Awesome, so next question is, who’s consuming this data internally? A trend that I’ve seen, especially in this last year, is everyone hiring e-commerce analysts to consume and do something with this data, who is consuming the data at your company? Is it a new role? Is it a team that is accessing this data besides yourselves, who… Who’s consuming it?
Molly
We have an e-commerce team that we’re utilizing the data amongst our team as well as sharing this out, I think a big thing that we found is sharing this data… Again, Instacart has really has a wealth of data for us to share across not only our brand teams, but our field sales teams, really impactful in helping us move the needle.
Todd
For brands out there, whether they are or not yet, you can use all those examples, you have everything on there, if you’re comparing your search or feature product performance from ROAS, but also your spend, impressions, cost per clicks, and you can see having those internal conversations about budget fluidity, you can kinda do a compare and contrast for your innovation team or for your brand teams, if you have unique UPCs out there with either innovation or maybe a club SKU, you can see with the data, how it’s performing, and especially from the feature product standpoint, you can give early reads to those partners, so they buy into whatever you are testing and then maybe if you have… With the sales team, a low performing SKU that’s in-store, it’s doing really well on Instacart, you can look at that by the kind of click, so the click-through rate might mean a discussion about getting you better in-store, shelf placement, more SKUs. So it can really be versatile across many departments, and you should always be showing you the finance to try and unlock more investment.
Melissa
Awesome. Alright, so next question. And Brian, have you answered this one first, so basket building is such an important concept to CPGs and on Instacart especially, ICIP data can show you what else your customers are buying, as we’ve been talking about, how can a brand use this data for bundling, advertising and other strategies, so these guys just said in that answer that same question, but can you speak to anything beyond what they mentioned? How others are using this?
Brian
A little bit, but I won’t add a ton. One just acknowledge sometimes our ability to generate insights is ahead of our ability to act on them, I think Instacart right now where we are, is that a lot of this stuff we were going is you’re gonna be able to talk to those consumers that could identify through some of these basket insights, but right now, I would say we’re using it in a couple of ways, one is to identify a behavior you didn’t know about, so maybe over how to lean the chocolate and candy manufacturers should be adding in things like other snacks that we’ll be able to identify that with them through the basket analysis don’t avoid that snack. It’s actually very appropriate for Halloween, or Easter, so a lot of key event analysis, I think is, which most of my team is focused on, is how do I make Easter and Thanksgiving and Christmas better by using this data, and the second would be to evaluate what you thought was gonna happen, so if you’re planning a big event on I don’t know, super bowl and you wanted to get multiple of your brands in the same basket, we can evaluate how that went on the Monday after the Super Bowl, that’s how fast we can evaluate it and course correct.
And then I think the last thing that we haven’t talked hugely about is about shopper profiling or mission profiling. So we identified for a pet food manufacturer that the vast majority of our pet food is bought on non-food shops, and so it isn’t bought with avocados bananas, and bread, it’s bought with garbage bags and household, shampoo and personal care, I think it helps create strategies long term for how the invest in the platform.
Melissa
Awesome, so Brian, sticking with you for a second, can you talk about category share, this is such a big thing across Amazon and other platforms that people are always looking for their category share, so can you talk a little bit about how ICIP data helps brands understand their category share, and then maybe Molly can speak to incremental share and budget
Brian
This was the first thing we really had to work on. I went to a million topic talks and 99% of the CMOs in the industry have a share, as they’re number one or two KPI, especially where we’re the fastest growing verticals, not just us but e-com. Nobody wants to be shared dilute on Ecom, so we had to actually create a measure of… Are you gaining share? So we did the hard work of putting it into the Nielsen standard hierarchy complemented by IRI, it doesn’t match everyone’s needs, but it’s at least a common language in the industry now, and people are using it to get very dynamic Melissa, so not only department share but category share to sub-category share. So we are able to understand how your strategies are impacting your decaffeinated coffee pod share, not just your total coffee, and seeing is your money being used effectively?
Melissa
Molly can you speak a little bit to incremental share and budgeting?
Molly
Yeah, for sure, and I think the ICIP data really gives us the opportunity to double-click into what’s driving those share metrics, whether that be the decomp chart or understanding the impact of our media spend on our category share. We’ve also found it to be extremely helpful to benchmark Instacart against other e-commerce platforms as well as offline channels, to assess whether or not we’re getting our fair share, and then that again, invites the conversation with our internal stakeholders to devise a game plan on how we help close any of those share gaps.
Melissa
Awesome, alright, so I know we have five minutes left. We have just a couple more questions and I’ll get to Q&A, so folks type in your questions. Okay, so how does ICIP data help you know your investment on Instacart is working? And what does working mean? Todd, let’s start with you.
Todd
I think there’s a number of ways, one, through QBRs and some other data coming here, you can look at your Share of category overall and see if that’s improving or not, but a recent one that I believe is gonna be launched here shortly as share of category where carry, if you don’t have distribution everywhere, you can now see, are you out competing the competition where you are and that can change the dynamic, both internally and how you view your performance? I think you can look at daily budgets versus maximize impressions campaigns for featured products, you can see the difference in performance there. To look at things, I’ve been a part of great QBRs with like Sam Huss and Ray McNally, but your early carts, how important it is to get into an early cart, and that difference of average order value, if you got in the first one versus the fourth week or its eighth week or 12th week, and there was a lot of retention tactics too, it’s not just about new to brand, but retention metrics, do you have lapsed users if you decreased investment and always kinda looking at the importance of always on… So there’s a lot of these comparison metrics as well as user metrics of retention, as well as the new to brands that can prove that your investment is working or not.
Melissa
Awesome. Molly, do you have anything to add to that? It was pretty comprehensive.
Molly
Yeah, I mean, I was gonna say the exact same thing, and I think it really just helps you to elevate the conversation internally outside of just the straight rows conversation, you can really bring in those other metrics to tell the whole story.
Melissa
Okay, really quick, before we get to the questions, Brian, is there a way that people can… How do you take feedback from people in the audience or from your customers to constantly improve the data?
Brian
So… Super great question right now. It’s sort of passive. We get feedback through our hundreds of QBRs, we do, I think 500 a year now, so from our partner’s very direct feedback on data access, data integrity, what are we doing next? We are building, and look forward in Q1, a tab within the insights portal that we can give us direct feedback that will be focused on two things, One, do we have your products in the right home, and two how can we help with access to data training, etcetera, so those are generally the two ways
Melissa
Awesome. Okay, let’s get to a couple of questions, so where are brands able to access affinity data is that through ICIP or does it need to be requested ad hoc?
Brian
That has to be requested through my team, and if you don’t know, the sales team has a varied idea of how to get to us, and we are getting fast on this stuff, but it’s not in the portal yet, it’ll probably take to H2 to get a lot of that stuff into the portal.
Melissa
And then another question is, Todd hit on another good point, launching new products is obviously a huge priority for many CPG brands. Is there a specific or a unique playbook or set of strategies that have become best practice for new products versus existing…
Todd
Yeah, I can say from experience, one is, before it even hit the shelves in stores, communication, make sure that all your buyers, that your retailers have set up the UPC or UPCs ahead of time, so it hits, its on Instacart quicker, if you let it… Versus letting it organically. I think you have to be ready also with looking at feature product campaigns to make sure you’re allocating the right amount of investment and being very active with keywords and looking at how it performs, and then another one is… Instacart has delivery promotions, that’s a great one, not only to build basket of your most popular items, but throw in on both the image on the banner, as well as making sure it’s part of the selection to try and get that trial. So those are a few things that have worked as well as driving in any traffic from social to Instacart calling out the new SKUs.
Brian
We get data from the retailers as to when a new product hits the shelves, to be super honest with the community here, we kinda struggle at this, and so anything you can do to help us identify a new product is coming, we’ll be able to get it into our storefront faster, because remember, it’s an algorithm from the retailer that let’s us know its on the shelf. And often new products sell out very quickly and we get suppressed, and so our new product launch curve is much delayed versus brick and mortar, so happy to work with any partner, if they know a new product launch is coming up to do the best we can on that.
Melissa
Awesome, well guys, we’ve hit 30 minutes, we promise short and sweet. This is a really great format, I think it was super helpful to the community here a lot about this data, it sounds like January is a big, big launch date for Instacart data for everyone, so maybe we can do another one of these that quarter? But thanks everyone, Molly, Todd, Brian and all of you on the phone for your time and look forward to doing more of these more often. Thanks everyone, Happy Holidays!
