Running retail media well (whether that’s on Instacart, Walmart Connect campaigns, or Roundel Media Studios placements on Target) generates real, measurable results. Sales velocity, digital sales penetration, units sold, ROAS, impressions, new-to-brand households. These are meaningful metrics, and they’re the foundation of what we report to brands we work with.
But there’s a deeper question that campaign data alone can’t fully answer: what is consumer behavior actually telling us about why velocity is moving the way it is?
Campaign metrics tell you what happened. Consumer behavior data tells you why and what to do next. Instacart’s Consumer Insight Platform, Eversight, can now help you get the full picture of this…and Celerity is now one of the first agencies with access to this data.
This access now gives us a deeper view of consumer behavior so we can make better decisions with your ad spend and it gives your sales team the consumer insights needed to walk into a buyer meeting with a compelling, data-backed story on why your brand deserves to be on-shelf and in-store. For CPG brands trying to grow their retail sales velocity or win the digital shelf, adding this layer of data to your retail media strategy changes things significantly.
So, what even is Eversight?
Instacart’s Eversight Consumer Insights Portal is a data analytics platform built on Instacart’s first-party shopper data and is one of the largest and most detailed retail consumer datasets now in existence. It gives brands real-time visibility into how consumers actually behave: what they search, what they buy, what they switch to, and what’s really driving their velocity up or down.
It’s built on a dataset that is genuinely unparalleled in the retail space:
But what makes it genuinely useful for retail media strategy is the structure of the data:
- The data comes directly from Instacart. No third-party approximations, no lag from data merging. Real consumers, real purchases, all verified.
- Clickstream data showing how consumers navigate their full shopping journey. It doesn’t just show what they bought, but how they got there.
- Consumer behavior is tracked over time, so we can see trends developing, not just point-in-time snapshots.
- The data is granular…down to the UPC level, by retailer, by week, giving us the specificity to make decisions that matter at the campaign level.
Together, these qualities produce insights that directly sharpen how we build, target, and optimize the retail media campaigns we run.
Here’s what that looks like in practice for the brands we work with.
How This Impacts Your Retail Sales Velocity
Know What’s Driving Your Sales (Or Killing Them)
We now can utilize the sales decomposition report within the platform to break down the factors behind your sales performance at a level that other reporting simply doesn’t offer. We can see exactly what drove the sales you have: buy rate, basket size, customer frequency, new versus returning buyers, spend per delivery.
If your velocity dipped last quarter, we can see whether it was driven by losing households or by existing customers buying less frequently.
Track New Product Launches in Real Time
New SKU launches are one of the highest-stakes moments in CPG. Syndicated data can often lag four to twelve weeks. Innovation tracking within Eversight gives us weekly performance data at the UPC level, by retailer, from the moment a product launches. For brands heading into a new distribution pitch or a first-time buyer review, having real performance data at week two instead of week twelve changes the conversation entirely.
Understand What Shoppers Search Before They Buy Your Product
Most brands know they need to win on search in retail media. Very few know which search terms are actually converting to sales in their category or what share of category dollars a given keyword is sending to their brand versus a competitor.
Eversight has a path-to-cart report that can reveal exactly that. We can see what consumers search before buying your product, how those search terms are trending, and where the category conversion opportunities are.
What This Means If You’re a Brand Working With Us
Our approach has always been to connect retail media into a strategy that targets consumers at every stage of the shopper journey. Eversight adds the consumer behavior intelligence layer that makes that full-funnel approach even more precise. Here’s the direct impact for brands we work with:
- Your campaigns are built on real category search behavior, not just assumptions. We know which terms convert in your specific category, and we bid accordingly.
- Your new SKU launches are monitored weekly from day one. No blind spots between launch.
- Velocity trends, new household acquisition, category growth contribution can be presented clearly, in the same conversation.
- Basket Affinity reports reveal which other categories and brands consumers are purchasing alongside your products – giving your marketing team a direct line of sight on co-marketing and cross-brand collaboration opportunities you wouldn’t have identified otherwise.
This is what a strong retail media strategy looks like when campaign execution and consumer intelligence work together.
Why Celerity Being Among the First Matters
Retail media is the fastest-growing segment in CPG marketing, and the brands who learn to pair paid retail media with real consumer behavior data will have a structural advantage over those working from pure campaign metrics alone.
As one of the first agencies to integrate Eversight’s Consumer Insights Portal into active client strategy, Celerity is ahead of that curve and the brands we work with are the ones benefiting. The consumer intelligence we now have access to isn’t something most retail media agencies can offer, and it’s not something brands can easily access independently.
The retail media landscape is moving in this direction. We’re already there.
The Bottom Line
Retail media spend without consumer behavior data is flying partially blind. You can see campaign performance, but you can’t fully see its impact on the thing that actually determines your brand’s future at retail: velocity.
Connecting those two (campaign performance and real consumer behavior) is what we’re now able to do for our clients.
Celerity is one of the first retail media agencies to integrate Instacart’s Eversight Consumer Insights Portal into active client strategy. If you want to understand what this could mean for your retail sales velocity, get in touch!
