How to use Meta Ads to grow supermarket sales when you can’t track every purchase

While Meta Ads can report in detail on what happens on its own platforms, it can’t tell you that somebody saw an Instagram ad on Tuesday and bought the product in Tesco on a Thursday.  

So, this changes how your campaign should be set up, optimised and measured. You need to go in with a clear idea of what success looks like and how you intend to measure it.  

Make the product easy to buy 

If the product is available online at a retailer, link people as close to it as you can. According to Attest’s 2025 UK F&B trends report, 38% of UK consumers do their supermarket shopping online as much as, or more than, in store. With deep links in place, retailer product pages offer a big opportunity to capture a purchase there and then.  

But this is still difficult to track. An owned “where to buy” page can help here, with deep links through to each retailer, giving you more data by tracking which retailer people use by product, creative and audience. The trade off is a higher barrier to purchase for the consumer. But this can show where there is more interest and help decide where to allocate investment.  

Optimise Meta Ads for attention and memory; use the right objectives 

Supermarket sales are not trackable in Meta. But the ads still need to make the product easier to recognise and remember in store or on a supermarket app.  

I would avoid defaulting your campaign objective to maximum reach or link clicks. Both tell Meta to find anyone and everyone to show the ad to. They can produce high volume, but don’t give much evidence that people meaningfully engaged. 

When you don’t have conversion tracking available, use an optimisation goal that reflects what the campaign needs to achieve. Estimated ad recall lift can suit awareness activity, while ThruPlay may work better when people need to watch enough of a video to understand it.  

Hook rate, hold rate, completion and recall lift say far more about the quality of attention than reach and clicks alone.

Frequency is crucial, deciding how often people see your ad. Up to 4 impressions per week is a good guide for retail but a launch, promotion, or new listing will need higher frequency over a shorter period.

Make the product easy to recognise

Creative is as important as ever, and it still needs to make the food or drink look good. With OGGS, we had a brand with great credentials: egg-free, better for the environment. But claims like these won’t rescue an ad where the product doesn’t look appealing. OGGS’ campaign needed to reach beyond their core vegan audience, so we focused on capturing indulgence. Texture close-ups, sleep pack shots, distinctive brand elements. We brought the branding forward in the video; so alongside the 1.9million impressions, we gained a 47% hook rate and 12% lift in ad recall. 

Creator and UGC-style content can also be very powerful in showing a taste reaction, serving occasion or recipe in a way that a pack shot cannot. Test it against polished brand creative rather than assuming one will always work better. Partnership Ads can then extend the strongest creator content.  

Product and pack still need to appear early. We all want strong engagement and retention, but neither means much if people remember the creator or joke but can’t recognise the product on the shelf! 

For Peacock Rice, we deliberately showed the product in the first frame and throughout the creative. This may have cost us a little hook rate, but recall increased. 

For retail campaigns, this can be a worthwhile trade-off. People need to recognise the product when they come across it again, and with Peacock we saw a 50% sales increase off the back of it.

Use D2C data to improve retail audiences and creative 

If your brand also sells directly to consumers, you have useful first-party data on the people who buy from them. Customer lists and purchase events can build powerful custom and lookalike audiences, repeat buyers, high-value customers, or people who bought a particular range are a stronger starting point than blanket approaches like using all website visitors.  

And you can use the same data to shape the creative. If certain age groups, locations or customer types buy more often, test ads around the occasions, needs and language that matter to them.  

Set a clear measurement framework 

You shouldn’t be months into a Meta campaign with no idea if the campaign is having an impact on sales. Before you start, set out what success means and why. Supporting a new listing, increasing rate of purchase and improving recall before an in-store sale need different campaign set-ups and evidence.  

If you have enough budget, controlled tests are your best practice. Use matched regions, staggered campaign starts or use exposed-versus-control analysis. Incrementality is your friend; this is measuring additional sales caused by Meta ads compared with what would have happened without it. Even if you can measure ROAS, this is a higher bar.  

Aside from this, I would measure three things:
 

1. Engagement. Frequency, hook rate, hold rate, completion and estimated ad recall lift show whether the creative earned attention and built memory. Performing well on these measures are an essential component, but not a proxy for the end sale.  
2. Intent. Retailer click-outs and store-locator use show movement towards purchase and can give you valuable data on where to focus resources.  
3. Commercial. Track weekly unit sales, value sales and rate of sales by SKU and retailer wherever the data exists. This is essential to measuring incrementality. 

Even with all of this, and the best incrementality measurement, we still have to accept we will never have perfect proof. So, look at the evidence together. Did people pay attention? Did more of them move towards a retailer? Did sales improve against a credible baseline or control group? 

Meta ads can support food retail sales, even when it cannot see the final transaction. Use it to make the product memorable. Give people a reason to want it and make it easy to find a retailer.  

Need help with your Meta Ads or struggling to measure their impact?

You can find out more about Fireworks, our digital performance studio, or drop us a message at toby.gould@catchafireagency.com