Across the globe, there are over 800 million Instagrammers — more than 500 million of whom use Instagram every single day, sharing more than 250 million piece of content each day.
It’s clear that Instagram isn’t just for personal use anymore. It’s now a global platform that allows brands to humanize their content, recruit new talent, showcase products, and inspire their audience.
Instagram users aren’t just active, they’re engaged. This photo and video sharing app has quickly turned into a top social media site.
More than half of the platform’s active users visit the site daily and 35% say they check it multiple times a day.
Instagram can also help you grow brand awareness and introduce products. 70% of Instagram users have spent time looking up a brand on the platform.
Instagram allows you to promote your brand and product in a friendly, authentic way without hard selling to your customers.
When Instagram was bought out by Facebook, we all knew that it would mean great things
for the photo-sharing social media app. One of the best parts of this merger was easily the addition of Instagram Ads to the outstanding Facebook Ads system.
While you can create both Facebook Ads and Instagram Ads under a single campaign (exactly like you can also enable the Audience Network or Messenger placements), there are several differences between Facebook Ads and Instagram Ads that marketers should be mindful of when they’re setting up and monitoring their campaigns.
In this guide to Instagram Ads, I am going to go over everything you need to know to:
• set up your Instagram Ad account,
• create and run campaigns,
• evaluate them for success,
• optimize them with the best strategies, formatting, and writing techniques.
Why You Need To Use Instagram Ads
Instagram Ads gives you an opportunity to create well-rounded campaigns for users at all stages of the funnel, more effectively build brand awareness and driving conversions at the same time.
3 Good Reasons To Give Instagram A Try
1. Instagram Ads is fully integrated with Facebook Ads, so you get the benefits of Facebook’s superior campaign customization options, diverse formatting, and assorted targeting capabilities combined with Instagram’s high engagement.
2. Instagram users are interested and ready to engage with brands and their ads on the platform. According to Yotpo, 58x more likely to engage with branded content on Instagram than on Facebook, and 120x more likely to engage on Instagram than Twitter.
3. Instagram users are not just more willing to engage, though; Yotpo also found that ad recall on Instagram Ads is 2.8x higher than ad recall from all other social networks. Not only are they more likely to click or like the ad, but they’re also more likely to remember it.
Instagram Ads is the ideal solution, letting you pay to ensure that your content is seen.
Statistics You Need To Know For sure you know about the 600+M (yes, million) of monthly active Instagram users, and the 400+M of daily active users. Let’s add to these the 150+M daily active Instagram Story users, the 4.2B (yes, that’s Billion) Likes per day and the 40+B photos posted to date.
Does this sound like a good reason for your business to be on Instagram?
Your competitors are there already. It’s estimated that Instagram will add another 26.9 million users by 2020.
Did you know that 90% of “Top 100 Global Brands” use Instagram?
36% of B2C brands and 13% of B2B brands consider Instagram to be “critical” or “very important” in their marketing strategy and it’s estimated that Instagram will add another 26.9 million users by 2020.
And there’s more!
On Instagram, 53% of users follow their favorite brand and, if compared to other popular social platforms, Instagram’s engagement with brands is 10 times higher than Facebook, 54 times higher than Pinterest and 84 times higher than Twitter.
Convinced to give Instagram a try now?
Instagram Story Ads - All You Need To Know
Instagram Story Ads are also part of Facebook’s Ad system, but they work a little differently than conventional Instagram newsfeed ads.
Unlike the newsfeed ads, Instagram Story Ads can only be run by themselves; you can’t simultaneously run them under the same ad set with any other placement type, because there just isn’t any equivalent on other platforms.
These ads have such different creative and technical requirements that there’s no way around this.
You can still choose detailed targeting, budgeting, bidding, and scheduling, but that’s about where the similarities end between Story Ads and the traditional Instagram newsfeed ads.
Instagram Story Ad Objectives
Instagram Story Ads are technically a separate placement and ad feature from the newsfeed Instagram Ads, and is currently limited to different objectives.
You can use the following ads for Instagram Story ads:
Reach, with the goal of showing your ad to as many people as possible
Video Views, which has the goal of getting as many people to view your video as possible
Traffic, which seeks to send the most amount of traffic to your site
Conversions, where the goal is to drive conversions like email signups, registrations, or sales
Mobile App Installs, which encourages users to download and install your app
Lead generation, which opens up a lead gen form that automatically fills out as much of a users’ information as possible
When possible, choosing Traffic, Conversions, Lead generation, or Mobile App installs are preferable to Video Views and Reach; the former four allow you to add links to your Story Ads, making them much more actionable, while the latter two do not.
Overtime, Instagram Story Ads may become available on additional objectives; when the
feature was first released, it was only available through the Reach objective, and the other four were released soon after.
After you’ve chosen an applicable objective, you’ll be able to choose Instagram Story placements.
Instagram Story Ads Placement: Technical Requirements
Instagram Story Ads have different creative requirements than all other types of Facebook Ads. Your Instagram Story Ads can be videos or images.
Image requirements and recommendations include:
- 9×16 image ratio Recommended image size of 1080 x 1920 pixels
Video requirements and recommendations include: - Maximum time of fifteen seconds 4:5 vertical aspect ratio Recommendations for .mp4, .mov, or .gif files
- Minimum width of 600 pixels Maximum file size of 4GB
- There is one striking similarity in creative requirements between newsfeed ads and Story Ads: you should be shooting for minimum text, especially on images.
Too much text (which translates into 20% of the image or more) can penalize you with ad distribution.
You do want to keep in mind that Instagram Stories have a different aesthetic than newsfeed ads; Stories should be fun, using the Snapchat-like features of filters, stickers, and drawing tools when applicable.
Unlike regular Stories, however, you have to add these on yourself beforehand in other image or video editing tools like Photoshop, as you need to upload the completed file to the Ads Manager.
Instagram Story Ads are a relatively newer feature for many brands, but it’s clear that they can be exceptionally profitable and engaging.
Best Practices for Instagram Story Ads
To get the most out of your Instagram Story Ads, you should follow these best practices:
Do something that demands that customers watch immediately. If a user clicks away from your Story Ad, that’s it– it’s gone. Because of this, it’s essential to use content that grabs users’ attention immediately and is incredibly memorable. Some brands users humor for this, others use textual cues to clue customers in, and some use images that just make you stop and think.
The example from Purple below shows all three.
Use video. Video is particularly powerful in Instagram Story Ads; it gives you more time on a user’s screen, and it gives you more room to get your point across. Fifteen seconds is better than five, after all.
Add your logo & branding onto the video.
Because you have to make a significant impression in a short amount of time (users can’t click back to your ad, so it has to stick), clearly place your logo and brand name in the story. This will help with brand recognition, and allows users to seek you out if they don’t click fast enough.