Instacart has introduced the Consumer Insights Portal, a new software platform for brands to access Instacart’s first-party grocery shopping data in real time.
Built on daily activity from nearly 100,000 stores and more than 1,800 retail banners, Consumer Insights Portal gives marketing, sales and insights teams self-serve access to SKU-level performance, search behavior, substitution patterns and promotion impact – based on actual transactions, not modeled data or survey panels.
The offering gives brands a faster, clearer picture of what’s driving trial, loyalty and basket-building across channels, and helps marketers refine promotions, product placement and media strategies week to week.
“Over the last few years, we’ve been focused on harnessing Instacart’s first-party data to deliver advanced measurement and metrics to our partners,” said Ali Miller, general manager of advertising at Instacart.
“What we’ve heard from brands and agency partners is that they’re eager to use our data to inform broader decision-making. We built the Consumer Insights Portal to surface actionable patterns in consumer behavior – information like brand switching, trial drivers and repeat rates – in a way that’s timely and directly useful.”
By productizing its first-party purchase data, Instacart is allowing brands to subscribe to actionable insights that can influence sales-driving Instacart Ads strategies while also informing broader decision-making across omnichannel consumer touchpoints.
The Consumer Insights Portal surfaces real-time trends and performance data.
Core capabilities include:
- Daily product-level sales data by category, brand and retailer.
- Path-to-purchase insights showing what consumers search, click and consider before buying.
- Substitution behavior analysis, revealing which products get swapped and why.
- Promotion performance, measuring impact on trial, habituation and incrementality.
- Launch and campaign tracking to evaluate week-over-week performance.
Brands are already using the Consumer Insights Portal to sharpen decision-making across the board by:
- Tracking trial and repeat rates for new product launches in near real time.
- Evaluating promotional ROI across retail partners.
- Comparing regional and national performance to guide display and distribution strategies.
- Identifying top-converting keywords and placements to fine-tune Instacart Ads campaigns.
With always-on access, brands no longer have to wait for lagging reports or rely on modeled assumptions. Consumer Insights Portal enables proactive decision-making and iterative campaign management.
“Having access to timely, real purchase data through the Consumer Insights Portal has been incredibly helpful for our team,” said Tara Scott, chief new growth officer and VP of alternative revenue streams at Coca-Cola Bottling Canada.
“It’s given us a clearer view into how consumers are discovering and choosing our products across customer channels and helped us move faster on decisions around promotion strategy and retail planning. We’re excited to keep building on these insights as we aim to advance our role as valued customer partners.”
With the Consumer Insights Portal, Instacart is expanding how brands can leverage its data, with a direct line to the consumer behavior signals that shape category performance. From marketing and sales to product and retail execution, the tool is designed to help brands move faster, act on real-time trends and make decisions grounded in what consumers are doing right now.
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