Gopuff Ads Launches in UK as Aggregators Expand Marketing Capabilities

Gopuff is expanding its advertising business overseas as leading players across the on-demand delivery business increasingly leverage these capabilities to boost their margins.

The convenience delivery company announced Thursday (Aug. 31) that it is launching its ads platform in the United Kingdom, offering brands options such as sponsored listings, in-email ads and data insights, leveraging CitrusAd’s technology.

“For two years, the world’s largest CPGs and most exciting emerging brands — from PepsiCo to Liquid Death — have leveraged Gopuff Ads to reach our young, engaged customers and drive incremental sales in the US,” Daniel Folkman, senior vice president of business at Gopuff, said in a statement, adding that the company has yielded a four-fold return on investment for advertisers in the United States.

Ads are proving a valuable way for major on-demand delivery players to increase profitability in a notoriously costly industry. Leading grocery aggregator Instacart, for instance, spoke to these efforts in its Form S-1 filed Friday (Aug. 25) with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) for a proposed initial public offering (IPO).

“Our grocery expertise has enabled us to build differentiated advertising solutions and tools that allow CPG brands to reach and engage with high-intent customers at the point of purchase and within minutes of delivery and consumption,” Instacart stated. “With our unique customer data and insights, we provide differentiated analytics for brands, allowing them to better optimize their advertising spend and grow their wallet share.”

Instacart noted that more than 5,500 brands leverage its ads offerings and that last year. Additionally, the business continues to grow significantly every year. The company saw 340% year-over-year growth in its advertising business between 2019 and 2020, 84% between 2020 and 2021, and 29% last year. The platform said its use of first-party customer behavior data such as “browsing, searching, purchasing, and choosing replacements,” protects the brand from the risks and challenges that come from relying on third-party data.

As the aggregator adds more advertising capabilities and looks to drive adoption, Instacart specifically named CitrusAd as well as Uber Eats advertising partner Criteo among its key competitors in the space.

To that point, Uber Eats, too, has been expanding its grocery advertising, kicking off its collaboration with Criteo in the spring.

“We launched sponsored items in the last quarter,” Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi told analysts on the company’s earnings call earlier this month, “which enables CPG advertisers to feature priority products within the Uber Eats app, … and CPG spend billions of dollars in … highly-targeted advertising for the specific products that they want to promote … to a specific audience. That’s typically a grocery audience that continues to grow.”

These moves come as online grocery overall is poised for growth. Research from “Tracking the Digital Payments Takeover: Catching the Coming eCommerce Wave,” created in collaboration with Amazon Web Services (AWS), which drew from an April survey of nearly 2,700 U.S. consumers, revealed that 32% of shoppers said they are very or extremely likely to increase their online grocery purchases in the next year.