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How to use instagram advertising


A 5-Step Guide to Using Instagram Ads

If you have a budget allocated for paid social, you should strongly consider running Instagram ads. Why?

27% of users say they find new products and brands through paid social ads, and Instagram ads can reach over 1.2 billion people, or 20% of the world’s population over age 13.

In this article, we’ll give you a comprehensive overview about how to advertise on Instagram, including an easy 5-step guide to create your first ad in just a few taps.

What are Instagram ads?

How much do Instagram ads cost?

Types of Instagram ads

How to choose the best Instagram ad type

How to advertise on Instagram

Best practices for Instagram ads

Bonus: Download a free pack of 8 eye-catching Instagram ad templates created by Hootsuite’s professional graphic designers. Start stopping thumbs and selling more today.

What are Instagram ads?

Instagram ads are posts for which businesses can pay to serve to Instagram users.

Source: Instagram (@oakodenmark, @elementor)

Similar to Facebook, Instagram ads appear throughout the app, including in users’ feeds, Stories, Explore, and more. They look similar to normal posts but always contain a “sponsored” label to indicate that they are an ad. They also often have more features than a normal post, such as links, CTA buttons, and product catalogs.

How much do Instagram ads cost?

The cost of Instagram ads is highly dependent on a variety of factors – there is no average or benchmark price. Some cost factors include:

  • Your targeting
  • Competitiveness of your industry
  • Time of year (costs often go up during holiday shopping periods in Q4 such as Black Friday)
  • Placement (costs can differ between ads shown on Facebook vs Instagram)

The best way to evaluate your budget is to set up a draft campaign in Ads Manager and look for the Audience Definition and Estimated Daily Results modules, which will tell you if your budget settings will be sufficient to reach your desired audience within your desired duration.

Note that there is no “best practice” for how much to spend. You can get started by spending just a few dollars a day, and scale up from there based on success.

In order to control the costs of your Instagram ads, you can set either daily budgets or lifetime spending limits. We’ll explain this in more detail in our 5-step guide below.

Types of Instagram ads

There are many different types of advertising formats on Instagram, including:

  • Image ads
  • Stories ads
  • Video ads
  • Carousel ads
  • Collection ads
  • Explore ads
  • IGTV ads
  • Shopping ads
  • Reels ads

The wide range means that you can choose the best ad type that matches your specific business goal. Each ad format has its own selection of call-to-action options, which are listed below.

Image ads

Image ads allow businesses to use single images to advertise their brand, products and services.

Source: Instagram (@veloretti)

Image ads are best suited for campaigns with compelling visual content that can be conveyed in a single image. These images can be created from high-quality photography or design and illustration.

It’s also possible to add text to images. However, Instagram recommends limiting overlaid text as much as possible for best results.



Instagram Stories Ads are full-screen image or video ads that appear between users’ Stories.

Instagram Stories are a well-used part of the app, with over 500 million Instagram users viewing Stories every day. Engagement is often higher with Stories ads, as the format covers the whole mobile screen and feels much more immersive than in-feed ads.

The best Instagram Stories ads are ones that look and feel like normal Stories and don’t stand out as ads. When designing Stories ads, businesses can use all organic Instagram Stories features like filters, text, GIFs, and interactive stickers.

Source: Instagram (@organicbasics)

Stories ads can use still photos, videos, and carousels. The call-to-action is presented as a swipe-up link at the bottom of the Story.

Video ads

Similar to image ads, video ads on Instagram allow businesses to give users a closer look at their brand, products, and services.

In-feed video ads can be up to 60 minutes long, but shorter videos are usually more effective. Read more best practices for designing Instagram video ads.

Source: Instagram (@popsocketsnl)

Carousel ads

Carousel ads feature a series of images or videos that users can swipe through. They can appear both in-feed and within Instagram Stories, with a call-to-action button or swipe up link that lead users directly to your website.

You can use carousel ads to:

  • Showcase a collection of related products
  • Tell a multi-part story
  • Share up to 10 images or videos

Source: Instagram (@sneakerdistrict)

Collection ads

Collection ads are a combination between carousel ads and shopping ads. Collection ads showcase products directly from your product catalog.

Collection ads are best suited for ecommerce brands, as they allow users to purchase products directly from the ad. When a user clicks on the ad, they’re directed to an Instagram Instant Experience Storefront where they can learn more about the product and proceed to purchase.

Source: Instagram (@flattered)

Explore ads

Explore ads appear within the Explore tab, an area of the platform where users discover new content and accounts that are tailored based on their Instagram usage habits. More than 50% of Instagram users access Explore every month, so it’s a great place to gain exposure.

Instagram Explore ads do not appear in the Explore grid or the topic channels, but rather are shown after someone clicks on a photo or video from Explore. As the content in users’ Explore tabs is constantly changing, Explore ads allow businesses to be shown alongside culturally relevant and trending content.

Explore ads can be both images and videos.

Pro Tip: No need to design brand new assets for Explore ads. You can simply re-use existing assets.

IGTV ads

IGTV ads are video ads that play after a user clicks to watch an IGTV video from their feed. Videos can be up to 15 seconds long, and should be designed for vertical full screen viewing (more IGTV ad specs).

They are shown midroll (in the middle of the video), potentially with the option to skip.

IGTV ads are currently available to users with Instagram Creator accounts in the US, UK, and Australia, with more countries rolling out soon. Creators can opt in to having ads shown in their IGTV videos, and receive 55% of the advertising revenue generated from each view.

Shopping ads

With 130 million users tapping on shopping posts every month, it’s no wonder Instagram has been heavily improving its ecommerce features over the last 1-2 years. With Instagram’s newest Shopping features, users can now view and purchase products without ever leaving the app (limited to businesses with Instagram Checkout enabled).

Instagram Shopping ads take users directly to a product description page within the Instagram app. They can then purchase through your mobile website.

In order to run Shopping ads, you need to set up your Instagram Shopping catalog.

Pro Tip: Take advantage of Hootsuite’s integration with Shopify to access your catalog right from your Hootsuite dashboard.

Source: Instagram

Reels ads

With the successful launch of Reels, Instagram recently announced the ability to advertise within Reels.

Ads are shown in between Reels, with similar specs to Stories ads (full screen vertical videos), and can be up to 30 seconds. They should include sound or music to be well-integrated with organic Reels.

How to choose the best Instagram ad type

With so many different ad types available, it can be overwhelming to select one to use for your campaign. The good news: Ads Manager is well set up for experimentation, which means you can test multiple formats and see which one performs best before running a full campaign.

To narrow down the formats, use these questions to guide you.

1. What is my goal?

With your social media marketing strategy in mind, identify the most important outcome for your Instagram ads campaign. Do you want to:

  • Drive traffic to your website?
  • Get video views for a new product?
  • Increase brand awareness for a new business?
  • Drive ecommerce purchases, app installs, or email signups?

After clarifying your goal, you can choose some potential formats based on the supported objectives and call-to-action options for each ad type. For example, Stories, IGTV and Reels ads are better for driving video views, while Shopping and Collection ads will be best for driving ecommerce purchases.

Bonus: Download a free pack of 8 eye-catching Instagram ad templates created by Hootsuite’s professional graphic designers. Start stopping thumbs and selling more today.

Download now

2.

Who is my target audience?

Depending on who you wish to target with your Instagram ads, some ad types may be better than others.

Think about your audience’s habits and behaviors. Do they like watching lots of videos? Are they avid online shoppers? Do they spend more time watching Stories and Reels instead of scrolling through their feed?

Choose ad types with objectives and call-to-actions that match your audience’s natural preferences.

3. What has performed best on organic?

Chances are that your organic followers have lots of similarities to the audience you’ll be targeting with your Instagram ads. So, look to your organic feed to see what types of content have performed well, and that can give you a good indication of what paid formats might resonate with your audience.

How to advertise on Instagram

There are two routes for creating Instagram ads campaigns: promoting a post and Ads Manager. Promoting an existing post only takes a few taps and can be done right from the Instagram app, but lacks the customization options available in Ads Manager.

Below, we’ll walk you through both methods.

Source: Instagram

Instagram advertising method 1: Promoting a post in-app

The easiest way to start advertising on Instagram is to promote one of your existing Instagram posts. This is similar to Facebook’s Boost Post option.

If you have a post that’s performing well in terms of engagement, promoting it within the app is a quick and easy method to scale up the post’s success—and show it to new people who aren’t following you yet.

You’ll need to have a business or creator account on Instagram to do this. You’ll also need to have a Facebook Business Page connected to your Instagram account (here’s how to connect your Facebook and Instagram accounts in Facebook Business Manager).

Then, it’s as simple as clicking Promote on the post you wish to turn into an ad.

You’ll be prompted to choose your preferred audience, destination, budget, and duration for your ad to run.

Finally, tap Create Promotion.

That’s it! Your ad will be reviewed and approved by Facebook. Once it goes live, be sure to monitor the results of your ad in the Promotions tab of your Instagram profile.

Instagram advertising method 2: Creating Instagram ads using Facebook Ads Manager (5-step guide)

In order to get the most out of Instagram’s extensive ad targeting, creative, and reporting abilities, you can use Facebook Ads Manager to create ad campaigns (remember that Facebook owns Instagram).

Although it requires a bit more work, our 5-step guide will guide you through the process.

Step 1: Choose your objective

To start, go to Ads Manager and click +Create.

First, you’ll need to choose your campaign objective from the list below.

Here’s a quick breakdown of what each of these objectives aims to achieve.

  • Brand awareness: Increase awareness of your business or products among users who haven’t heard of you yet.
  • Reach: Show your ad to as many people as possible in your target audience.
  • Traffic: Drive clicks to your website, app, or any other URL.
  • App installs: Get users to download your app.
  • Engagement: Increase comments, likes, shares, event responses, and offer claims on your ad.
  • Video views: Get video views from users most likely to watch it.
  • Lead generation: Gather personal info from interested users (i.e. email signups).
  • Messages: Get users to send a message to your brand account.
  • Conversions: Drive sales or sign-up conversions on your website or app.
  • Catalog sales: Promote sales from your online store catalog.
  • Store traffic: Direct users to your brick-and-mortar location.

This video can help identify your objective:

[Instagram Ad Options video]

After selecting your objective, you’ll be prompted to name your campaign. Tip: Give it a specific name based on the campaign objective to help you keep track of your campaigns.

Finally, you’ll have the option to turn on Campaign Budget Optimization. This option allows Facebook’s algorithm to determine how to spend your budget across ad sets. AdEpresso has a full guide about if you should use Campaign Budget Optimization.

Step 2: Choose your budget and schedule

In this step, you’ll choose how much you want to spend and how long your campaign will run.

For your budget, you’ll have two options:

  • Daily budget: Set a maximum daily spend, useful for always-on ads
  • Lifetime budget: Set a maximum spend for your whole campaign, useful for ads with a clear end date

Under Ad Scheduling you can choose to run ads continuously (most common), or only at certain times of day (for example, if you’re a food delivery company and only want to run ads in the evening when your audience is most likely to place delivery orders).

As you adjust these options, you’ll see the Audience Definition and Estimated Daily Results modules in the right-hand column which will give you an idea of expected reach for your chosen budget. Try to choose settings so that your ad set falls in the middle of the green range.

Step 3: Identify your audience

The next step is to define your audience targeting. In this step you can either Create a New Audience or use a Saved Audience.

Saved Audiences are useful if you have your own custom audience data (i.e. past website visitors) or past audiences from previous campaigns that performed well. If not, you can create a new audience based on demographics, interests, and behavioral targeting.

During this step, you can also select Dynamic Creative. If you choose this option, you can upload separate visual assets and headlines, and Facebook will automatically create combinations that are optimized for your target audience.

Step 4: Select your ad placements

In the Placements section, you can decide where your ads will appear.

There are two options:

  • Automatic Placements: Ads will be shown to your audience wherever they’re likely to perform best.
  • Manual Placements: You can choose specifically where your ad will appear (and not appear). If you want to limit your ads to show only on Instagram (not Facebook), you can choose this using Manual Placements.

Here’s where you can select your manual placements:

While previewing placements, Ads Manager will display the technical requirements for each one. To ensure your visual assets are optimized for each format, see our guide to social media image sizes.

Step 5: Create your ads

Now it’s time to create the actual ad. Start by choosing your Facebook Page and corresponding Instagram Account. Then you can select your preferred ad format.

Then, proceed to fill out the rest of the details under Ad Creative:

  1. Choose your pictures or videos (unless you’re using an existing post)
  2. Input your ad copy
  3. Select a payment option
  4. Review your ad
  5. Click Confirm

At this step you will also choose the call-to-action button and enter the URL where you want to send people who click on your ad.

If you want to track conversions from your ad, it’s important to select the Facebook Pixel in the Tracking section. Once connected to your website or app, your Facebook pixel will allow you to see insights about how your audience interacts with your business after clicking on your ad.

When you’re ready, click Confirm to launch your Instagram ad.

Best practices for Instagram ads

Now you have everything you need to know about setting up and launching Instagram ads. The next step is designing effective visual assets for your ads.

Here are some tips for how to design attention-grabbing creative for Instagram ads.

Design mobile-first ads

98.8% of users access social media via a mobile device, so it’s vital to design your creative for mobile viewing, not desktop.

Here are a few tips to design mobile-first ads:

  • When capturing video content, make sure to film in vertical (9×16) as this is easier to crop to 4×5 than from landscape
  • Minimize the amount of text in your ads
  • If you do add text, choose large font sizes that are easy to read on mobile screens
  • Add animations and motion graphics to videos to quickly engage viewers
  • Keep videos short (15 seconds or less)

Keep branding and messaging upfront

The first few seconds of your ad will determine whether a viewer will stop scrolling and watch the whole thing. That’s why it’s important to start your ad with the key message and showcase your branding within the first 3 seconds.

Use sound to delight

40% of users consume social media with sound off. As such, it’s important to design your ads for sound-off consumption, and to use sound to delight users who do have sound on. Here’s how to do that:

  • Use visual elements to tell your story and deliver your key message without sound
  • Add captions for any voiceover or scripted audio
  • Use text overlay to deliver your key message without sound

Pitch, play, plunge

Facebook recommends designing a combination of creative types that work together to grab attention and reward interest:

  • Pitch: Short assets that get the campaign idea across immediately and grab attention
  • Play: Assets that allow light exploration and interactivity for interested audiences
  • Plunge: Immersive assets that allow people to go in-depth into your campaign idea

Looking for more inspiration? Here are 53 examples of amazing Instagram ads.

Get the most out of your Instagram advertising budget with AdEspresso by Hootsuite. Easily create, manage, and optimize all your Instagram ad campaigns in one place. Try it free today.

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Bonus: Get the Instagram advertising cheat sheet for 2022. The free resource includes key audience insights, recommended ad types, and tips for success.

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The Complete Guide to Advertising on Instagram

So you’re running paid search and display ads through Google, you’re advertising on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and even some niche industry-related social sites. Perhaps you’re even running some guerilla advertising campaigns, or commercials through NPR. But for some strange reason, you dismissed Instagram, unsure if it would yield ROI.

Well, I’m here to inform you that today is not the day to ignore Instagram! While Instagram may be younger, with fewer users, than its parent company Facebook, Instagram is the breakout star of the family who everyone wants to sit next to at the Thanksgiving table. Instagram provides a platform to tell visual stories through various ad formats, and many advertisers have seen this channel yielding higher ROI in comparison to their other advertising campaigns.

Today Instagram has 800 million active users, according to Statista, and the rate of rapid growth it has seen since 2013 is pretty astounding. Just check out the graph below.

But with so many active folks scrolling through their feeds at all hours of the day, how in the world can a little business like yours stand out?

This is where Instagram advertising comes into play. Similar to Facebook, with popularity comes clutter, and breaking through that clutter organically to make a real impact can feel nearly impossible. To focus on the right people, at the right time, with the right message and imagery, Instagram ads are your powerful vehicle to do just that…

In this guide you’ll learn everything you need to know to get started with an Instagram advertising campaign.

<<Short on time? Get our free All-Star Playbook to Online Advertising, to read later.>>

What Is Instagram Advertising?

Instagram advertising is method of paying to post sponsored content on the Instagram platform to reach a larger and more targeted audience. While there are many reasons a business or individual may decide to advertise, Instagram advertising is often utilized to grow brand exposure, website traffic, generate new leads, and move current leads down the funnel (and hopefully towards converting).

Since Instagram is such a visual platform, text ads are not a thing here. Rather you need an image, set of images, or video (which can be accompanied by text) to reach your audience with Instagram ads.

The exciting part? Instagram advertising works! In March 2017, over 120 million Instagrammers visited a website, got directions, called, emailed, or direct messaged to learn about a business based on an Instagram ad. According to Instagram, 60% of people say they discover new products on the platform, and 75% of Instagrammers take action after being inspired by a post.

Similar to Facebook ads, throwing some money behind a post will lead to more exposure for your brand, as well as more control over who can see your post.

For more fun facts about Instagram, check out this post.

Is Instagram Advertising Right for Your Business?

This leads to the obvious question: Who is on Instagram? Is it just teenagers taking selfies? Or 20-somethings looking for recipes? What about older populations? Are they “gramming” their grandchildren?

Unfortunately for all you marketers targeting the grandparent demographic, Instagram does tend to skew towards a more youthful audience, with the largest percentage of users falling in the age range of 18-29 (55%), then between 30-49 years-old (28%). Only 11% of Instagram users are between the ages of 50-64, and just 4% are adults over 65.

According to Hootsuite, the majority of Instagram users live in urban areas (32%), 28% of users live in the suburbs, and 18% of users in the country. While there are more women on Instagram than men, the gender gap is not as large as it once was.

If this doesn’t sound like the audience you’re targeting, you still should not dismiss the social network as a useless opportunity. Similar to what happened with Facebook, more and more adults over 34 will likely be hopping on the Instagram bandwagon as the platform continues to grow. Also, if you are working with the 4% of adults over 65, you can always target that demographic directly…

Via Jenn’s Trends

Similar to many other social advertising platforms, Instagram gives you the granular control to target specific genders, age ranges, locations, interests, behaviors, and more. You can even target a custom or lookalike audience so you’re showing ads only to your direct list of leads or those who have a similar makeup.

What advertisers should really latch onto is the fact that Instagram uses Facebook’s demographic data to serve up ads to the appropriate parties. This makes the tool super valuable for advertisers looking to target a niche audience, because Facebook already has a thorough history and thorough demographic targeting options.

Instagram advertising can be especially powerful if you’re in a visual or creative industry, such as the restaurant business or craft marketing.

How Much Do Instagram Ads Cost?

This is a tricky question to answer, as costs are based on a variety of factors, and as you may have suspected these factors are not all revealed to us by the platform. The model is based on CPC (cost-per-click) and CPM’s (cost per impressions), and prices are determined according to Instagram’s ad auction.

“The cost of Instagram ads are influenced by many factors — everything from your audience to your ad feedback,” says Andrew Tate from AdEspresso. “There’s a lot that goes into understanding how to advertise on Instagram.”

AdEspresso recently dug into $100 million worth of Instagram ad spend in 2017, and found that the average cost per click (CPC) for Instagram ads in Q3 ranged between $0.70 and $0.80. While this is a helpful benchmark it will of course vary depending upon the auction, audience, competition, time of day, day of week, etc.

Some advertisers find that Instagram ads often have higher engagement, but this can cost them. According to Keith Baumwald, founder of Leverag Consulting, Instagram ads costs are slightly higher in cost than Facebook ads. Baumwald claims that since the ads are so highly targeted you could end up paying as high as $5 a CPM.

On the bright side, advertisers do have control over how their budgets are allocated. For instance, you can choose between a daily budget to limit the amount spend per day or a lifetime budget where you would set up your ads to run for a length of time until the budget is depleted.

Other ways to control your Instagram ad spend include setting your ad schedule (for instance, you can specify certain hours of the day you want your ads to run), setting your ad delivery method (there are three options: link clicks, impressions, and daily unique reach), as well as setting your bid amount (manual vs. automatic).

6 Easy Steps to Start Advertising on Instagram

Learning the ins and outs of a new advertising platform might seem overwhelming at first. The good news here is that if you’re advertising on Facebook, there isn’t much to learn. In fact, Instagram ads can be configured right through Facebook Ad Manager.

If you’re not advertising on Facebook, don’t fret. We’ll walk you through the process below, and there is also the option to create some simple ads directly within the Instagram app.

Advertisers who are more advanced or running a relatively large ad set can also chose to configure their ads through Power Editor or Facebook’s Marketing API. Instagram Partners is also available for businesses who need to buy and manage multiple ads, manage a large community, and deliver content at scale.

For this post, we’ll focus on creating ads through Facebook Ad Manager, which is the most common method due to its ease-of-use and the ability to customize these ads to a higher degree than what is possible within the app itself. While configuring Instagram ads is not overly complex, there are quite a few steps to be aware of. Starting with…

1. Navigate to Facebook’s Ad Manager

To navigate to ad manager within Facebook, simply follow this link, assuming you’re logged in to the appropriate Facebook account.

Note: There is no specific Ad Manager for Instagram; Instagram ads are managed through the Facebook Ads UI.

2. Set Your Marketing Objective

Now for the fun part, choosing your campaign goal. Luckily, the goals are named in a self-explanatory manner. Need more traffic? Select the traffic goal. Looking to increase brand awareness? Choose the brand awareness goal. You get the gist.

One thing to be aware of is that Instagram ads only work with the following goals:

  • Brand awareness
  • Reach
  • Traffic (for clicks to your website or to the app store for your app)
  • App installs
  • Engagement (for post engagement only)
  • Video views
  • Conversions (for conversions on your website or app)

While these goals are intuitive, some come along with a few additional configuration steps, which I’ll run through for you.

Brand awareness: Take an extra-long lunch. No extra steps here! This is the most standard goal that will try to show your ads to more potential people likely to be interested. How does Instagram determine this? It’s a secret, but this goal will likely expose some new and relevant folks to your brand.

Reach: If reach is what you’re looking for (as in maximizing how many people see your ads) then you’ll just need to be sure to select your Instagram account when creating the ad itself. It’s also worth noting that if you’re looking to run an Instagram Story ad “reach” is currently the only objective you can chose. The cool thing about this goal is that you can take advantage of Facebook’s split testing feature, which allows you to split test two ads to see which one yields more installs. NOTE: Split testing is also available for Traffic, App Installs, Video Views, Lead Generation, and Conversion goals.

Traffic: If you’re looking to send more people to your website or app store to download your app, this is the appropriate goal for you. The only additional steps you’ll need to take is choosing between those two options, then enter the URL of choice, and let the traffic jam in!

Engagement: Who doesn’t want more likes, shares, and overall engagement? If your goal is engagement, one thing to note is that you currently can only pay to play for “post engagement” on Instagram. Facebook will allow you to pay for “page engagement” and “event responses,” but this is not currently available to Instagram.

App Installs: If your main goal is app installs, you’ve come to the right place. To configure this you’ll need to choose your app from the app store during set-up.

Video Views: Videos are often an investment of time and money, so not promoting your video on Instagram would be like buying a plane ticket to Hawaii, and leaving it in your desk. Luckily, this goal is very straightforward, and doesn’t require additional setup steps.

Lead Generation: Who doesn’t want more leads? If that is your main goal this objective is for you. Just note that lead generation ads do not provide all of the same pre-filled fields as Facebook. Instagram currently only supports email, full name, phone number, and gender. These ads also have more of a barrier than Facebook lead generation ads, since when leads click to open the ad they’ll need to click through to fill out their information. On Facebook, leads can fill out their information without all the additional clicking. The other set-up piece is that you’ll need to create a lead form when creating your ad. If you’re interested in learning more about lead ads check out this post.

Conversions: Last, but certainly not least, we have conversions. This goal allows you to drive your leads to take action and convert on your website or within your app. The additional set-up here requires you to configure either a Facebook pixel or app event based on the website or app you’re looking to promote; this will allow you to track conversions.

3. Configure Your Target Audience

Now that you’ve selected your objective, you need to target the appropriate audience to get your ads in front of the right people. This is the true beauty of Instagram ads since you’ll be using Facebook’s depth of demographic knowledge to reach the right people.

If you’ve done this for Facebook ads before you likely already have several audiences built, and are quite familiar with the process. If you’re new to this process here’s a run-down of your targeting options, which you can layer to get a precisely targeted audience. (For instance if you want to target women, in New York, between the ages of 19 and 65, who are interested in yoga and health food, you can do just that!)

Location: Whether you want to target a country, region, state, city, zip code, exclude or include certain places, location targeting will allow you to do all of this and more.

Age: Allows you to target ranges from age 13 to 65+

Gender: Choose between all, men, or women

Languages: Facebook recommends leaving this blank unless the language you’re targeting is not common to the location your targeting.

Demographics: Under “Detailed Targeting” you’ll find demographics, which has several sub-categories with even more sub-categories under those. For instance, you can target “Demographics” > “Home” > “Home Ownership” > “Renters.”

Interests: Interests is also under “Detailed Targeting” with multiple sub-categories to dig into. For instance, if you’re looking for people interested in distilled beverages, science fiction movies, and aviation, those options are available for you!

Behaviors: And yet another “Detailed Targeting” option with multiple sub-categories to explore. Whether it be purchasing behaviors, job roles, anniversaries, or other behaviors the options seem endless.

Connections: Here you’ll be able to target people connected to your page, app, or event.

Custom Audience: Custom audiences let you upload your own list of contacts allowing you to target leads already in your pipeline or customers who you’re looking to upsell.

Lookalike Audience: If your custom audience is tapped to their potential, create a lookalike audience. This will allow Instagram to find people who have similar traits to your other audiences.

Once you’ve configured your audience, Facebook will also provide you with a guide to how specific or broad your audience is (like the one below).

This is an important tool to pay attention to, because you want to strike a balance of your audience not being too huge (since it’s likely not targeted enough), but also not being too specific (in the red zone), since there may not be many people (if any) to reach with so many layered targets.

4. Choose Your Placements

Now that you’re targeting your ideal demographic, it’s time to choose your placements! This is critical if your goal for a campaign is to only show ads on Instagram. If you choose to ignore this step, Facebook will allow your ads to appear on both platforms.

This isn’t necessarily a negative thing, but if you have content that you’ve created specifically for Instagram, you should select “Edit Placements” here.

From here you can specify Instagram as a placement, as well as if you’d like these ads to appear in the feed and/or the stories section of the platform.

5. Set Your Budget and Ad Schedule

If you are familiar with how budgets work through Facebook, AdWords, and other digital advertising platforms, this step should not be overly challenging for you. If not, then take a deep breath; while you might not know exactly where to set your daily or lifetime budget when running your first Instagram ad campaign, this comes with trial and error, as well as experience. And the good thing is you have the control to pause or stop your campaign at any time if you feel your budget is not being properly allocated.

So should you go daily or lifetime? While I typically lean towards daily budgets since it guarantees your budget won’t be spent too quickly, lifetime budgets allow you to schedule your ad delivery, so there are pluses and minuses to both options. I would also advise exploring the advanced options pictured below. For instance, if you bid manually you’ll have the control to decide how much each lead is worth to you.

As mentioned above, you can also run an ad schedule to target specific times of day and days of the week when you know your audience is most active on the platform. This is a super valuable way to optimize your budget. As a reminder, this is only available for those using a lifetime budget.

6. Create Your Instagram Ad

Now it is time to create your Instagram ad!

Hopefully after taking the steps above you already have some content in mind for the ad you are looking to promote. This part of the set-up may look different depending upon your campaign objective, but you’ll always have a few ad format options to choose from. So as a next step, let’s discuss the various ad formats available.

Instagram Ad Formats

If you are a bad decision-maker, you may want to brace yourself. Instagram has six ad formats to choose from. (This is way fewer than Facebook!) Two of those are for Instagram stories, which appear at the top of the feed in a manner similar to Snapchats. The other four are formats designed for the Instagram feed, which are more commonly used by advertisers.

#1. Image Feed Ads

This is your most standard ad format, and likely the one you see most often scrolling through your own feed. These ads are single images that will appear as a native experience as your target lead is scrolling through their feed. The lovely thing about these ads is that they don’t feel like ads, especially when done well.

Here are some additional details to be aware of:

Technical Requirements

  • File type: jpg or png
  • Maximum file size: 30MB
  • Minimum Image Width: 600 pixels
  • Image Ratio: 4:5 minimum, 16:9 maximum
  • Text length: 2,200 maximum (*although Instagram recommends staying below 90 for optimal delivery)
  • Hashtag Number: 30 maximum (*you can add additional in the comments)

Supported Objectives

  • Reach
  • Traffic
  • Conversions
  • App Installs
  • Lead Generation
  • Brand Awareness
  • Post Engagement
  • Product Catalog Sales
  • Store Visits

Supported Call-to-Action Buttons

  • Apply Now
  • Book Now
  • Call Now
  • Contact Us
  • Get Directions
  • Learn More
  • Get Showtimes
  • Download

#2.

Image Story Ads

Same concept as above, but these are for Instagram stories! Instagram Story ads details below:

Technical Requirements

  • Image Ratio: 9:16 recommended
  • Minimum Image Width: 600 pixels

Supported Objectives

  • Reach
  • Traffic
  • Conversions
  • App Installs
  • Lead Generation

Supported Call-to-Action Buttons

  • Apply Now
  • Book Now
  • Contact Us
  • Download

3. Video Feed Ads

Bring your ad to life with a video! If you’ve put the time in to make a quality video, then you should absolutely be promoting it through your Instagram feed.

While most video files are supported by Instagram, they recommend using H.264 compression, square pixels, fixed frame rate, progressive scan, and stereo AAC audio compression at 128kbps+ (PRO TIP: if your video is not meeting these requirement you can always run it through the video transcoder, Handbrake, to make these adjustments).

Technical Requirements

  • Video Resolution: 1080 x 1080 pixels (at least)
  • Maximum file size: 4GB
  • Video Ratio: 4:5 minimum,16:9 maximum
  • Video Duration: 60 seconds maximum
  • Video Captions: optional
  • Image Ratio: 4:5 minimum, 16:9 maximum
  • Text length: 125 characters maximum recommended
  • Hashtag Number: 30 maximum (*you can add additional in the comments)

Supported Objectives

  • Reach
  • Traffic
  • Conversions
  • Lead Generation
  • Brand Awareness
  • Post Engagement
  • Store Visits

Supported Call-to-Action Buttons

  • Apply Now
  • Book Now
  • Call Now
  • Contact Us
  • Download

#4. Video Story Ads

This is another great place to run video ads, because stories are where users often expect to see videos, so the “selling” part of advertising doesn’t feel as forced. The recommended video specs for uploading are the same as listed above, and here are some additional details to keep in mind!

Technical Requirements

  • Video Resolution: 1080 x 1920 pixels (at least)
  • Maximum file size: 4GB
  • Video Ratio: 9:16 maximum
  • Video Duration: 15 seconds maximum
  • Video Captions: not available

Supported Objectives

  • Reach
  • Traffic
  • Conversions
  • Lead Generation
  • App Installs

Supported Call-to-Action Buttons

  • Apply Now
  • Book Now
  • Call Now
  • Contact Us
  • Download

#5. Carousel Feed Ads

Next we have carousel feed ads. How fun are these! This format allows you to show a series of scrollable images rather than just one single image.

This ad type is great for very visual brands, like those in the food industry, furniture sellers, clothing options, vacation destinations, car dealerships, etc. But they’re not only for “sexy” businesses; they can also work to humanize your brand or show off your culture by showing the people behind your software or financial company.

The carousel format allows you to choose from up to 10 images within a single ad, each with its own link. Video is also an option for these ads.

Technical Requirements

  • File type: jpg or png
  • Maximum file size: 30MB
  • Minimum Image Width: 600 pixels
  • Image Ratio: 4:5 minimum, 16:9 maximum
  • Text length: 2,200 maximum (*although Instagram recommends staying below 90 for optimal delivery)
  • Video Duration: 60 seconds maximum
  • Hashtag Number: 30 maximum (*you can add additional in the comments)

Supported Objectives

  • Reach
  • Traffic
  • Conversions
  • Brand Awareness
  • Lead Generation
  • Product Catalog Sales

Supported Call-to-Action Buttons

  • Apply Now
  • Book Now
  • Contact Us
  • Call Now
  • Download

#6.

Canvas Story Ads

And last, but definitely not least, we have the newest addition to the ad format family, Canvas ads. There ads are truly immersive, allowing advertising to create a 360 VR experience within their story. They’re only supported via mobile devices, and extremely customizable for the advertiser, but you will need some technical chops. These ads work with image, video, and carousel. Check out this guide to learn more about Canvas ads.

Technical Requirements

  • Minimum Image Width: 400 pixels
  • Minimum Image Height: 150 pixels

Supported Objectives

  • Reach
  • Brand Awareness
  • Traffic
  • Conversions
  • Lead Generation
  • Post Engagement
  • Video Views
  • Store Visits

Supported Call-to-Action Buttons

  • Apply Now
  • Book Now
  • Contact Us

5 Instagram Advertising Best Practices

Now that you’ve got the basic principles of Instagram advertising down, it is time to get the highest ROI possible by following these Instagram best practices to create great Instagram ads.

#1. Instill Each Ad with Personality

Whether it be a funny goof, an emotional video, or just an intriguing image showing off your culture, if your Instagram post doesn’t feel humanized then you will not reach your engagement potential.

People use Instagram to be entertained, amused, or amazed. Whether it’s while you’re on the train to work or when you are unwinding after a long day of work, no one is looking to hop on Instagram to see a boring corporate advertisement. This is why appealing to emotions is always the way to go. Check out this fun post from Shape Magazine as a perfect example.

#2. Make Sure Your Ad Is Contextually Relevant

What works with one social media platform won’t necessarily work with another. For instance, your business likely wouldn’t promote the same content through LinkedIn as they would through Twitter, as the audience is typically in a different state of mind.

The same goes for Instagram. Put yourself in your target buyer’s shoes and be aware of where they are. On Instagram, do you think your lead is likely to download and read your 40 page e-book? Probably not. Ensure your ads do not feel overly sales-driven because this isn’t typically what Instagram is used for.

#3. Use Hashtags…

But don’t just hashtag #food or #love. Get more creative, and do some user research to see which hashtags are more likely to be searched for by your audience. Also, don’t overdo it with hashtags. This can make your post look a bit sloppy and desperate.

The ideal number? TrackMaven analyzed 65,000 posts and found that 9 hashtags is the ideal number for highest post engagement. They also found that longer hashtags often perform better.

#4. Run a Contest

Promoting a contest or giveaway is by far one of the most effective ways to reach your goals faster with Instagram advertising. Why? Because people love competition and free stuff! What better way to get your audience excited about your brand?

If you need some help with how to go about this, check out this awesome post on how to run an Instagram giveaway from WordStream’s very own Dan Shewan.

#5. Post at Optimal Hours

I spoke a bit about this during the budgeting step of Instagram ad-set up, but using the ad-schedule feature (which is only available with lifetime budgeting) is a great way to get people at the right time.

Via CoSchedule

If you know your audience well, this shouldn’t be too hard to determine, but trial and error can also work here. Think about your vertical. If you’re an online retailer, when do people typically shop for clothing online? Or if you’re a car dealership, what days of the week do you see the highest spike in website traffic? Asking these questions is a good place to start.

Without further ado, set forth and advertise on Instagram! This is one platform you should not ignore, and this guide should provide you with enough resources to become insta-famous.

Looking for more help? Check out:

  • 24 Instagram Marketing Tools for More Followers, Likes & Sales
  • The 15 Best Instagram Marketing Campaigns of the Year
  • 10 Killer Instagram Marketing Tips for Brands
  • The Complete Guide to Instagram Analytics
  • 7 Ways to Boost Holiday Instagram Sales

How to Run Instagram Ads: A Step-by-Step Guide

Instagram is not only one of the most popular social networks, but also an effective advertising platform.

How to get started with targeted ads on Instagram
  1. If you don't have a Facebook page for your business, create one.
  2. If you don't have an official Instagram account, you need to create one and link it to Facebook.
  3. Prepare images or videos to be used in advertising.

Sign in to Ads Manager and click Create.

How to properly set up Instagram ads through Facebook

1. Choose a promotion objective

Not all Facebook ad objectives are suitable for promoting on Instagram. Among the proposed options, we recommend the “Conversions” goal. In this case, you will be able to optimize ads for a certain cost per conversion.

2. Set up ads

Go to the "Ad group" tab. Choose where you want the ad to go - it's a website, app, Messenger, or WhatsApp. In the case of messengers, the user will go from the advertisement to the correspondence with your account.

Next, set up the audience.

For users who were on the site

If you already have a Facebook pixel installed on your site and it has collected enough data about visitors, you can use this information to target ads to an existing audience. To do this, click "Create" - "Custom Audience" . You can read more about remarketing on Facebook in the article on ppc.world. Other targetings can be skipped - they will only reduce the already existing "warm" base.

But this audience can be expanded thanks to a smart Facebook algorithm that selects users with similar behavior. To do this, click Similar Audience .

For new users

Geotargeting . You can select people who live in the selected place, who have recently visited it, or travelers:

Find the area itself through the search (regions, settlements) or specify using a marker. The range is also configurable. Several places can be marked.

Gender, age, languages ​​ . Everything is clear here. To set up targeting, proceed from your knowledge of the target audience of your business.

Demographics and interests . This group of targetings is called "detailed targeting" on Facebook.

Start entering the estimated interest of your target audience in the field. Facebook will immediately offer tips, and also inform you about the hypothetical size of the audience when you hover the cursor:

If you click on the button "Recommendations" , Facebook will offer you several related interests that it thinks you can add to your targetings:

If you want to target more precisely, there are two more settings:

  1. "Narrow audience" - so you add a strict condition (users have all the specified interests at the same time).
  2. "Exclude people" - this is how you remove people with a particular interest from the audience.

    In menu "Links" you can add people who have interacted with your Facebook page, app, or event invite:

    Specify placements and budget . Facebook has a large number of placements for placing your ads. In this case, we are interested in Instagram.

    In his case, he will also have to make a choice: show your ads in the social network feed, Stories, on the "Interesting" tab on Instagram, or in several places at once. Stories ads are primarily a visual impact tool. If you need to use a lot of text, opt for the Ribbon.

Below you can select the type of mobile devices on which ads will be shown. As a rule, this is useful for mobile app sellers on Android or iOS.

Set the budget (daily or for the entire duration of the campaign), as well as the start and end of the campaign, if relevant.

We recommend starting with a small budget, after the test, evaluate the results and make changes.

3. Create ads
  • Go to the "Advertising" section on the left.
  • Specify identification data - how your company will be presented in advertising.
  • Select a format.

Please note that only Single Image or Video and Carousel options are available for Stories (images are displayed one after the other).

Carousel is good for advertising several products at the same time. "Selection" - for a spectacular and versatile presentation of one product. In many cases, however, a minimalistic solution with a single media file will work.

Select pictures and videos. Facebook provides stock images and allows you to use them in your ads. However, unique photographs - high-quality and natural, evoking emotions - are now more valued in advertising.

We recommend that you run a split test: choose several options for images, so that later you can choose the most converting one.

Next, fill in the ad with text and other data. Facebook will show you how the ad will look in the preview.

Done! If you have filled in all the required fields in the settings and deposited money into the balance, the ad will be sent for moderation.

A step-by-step guide to launching advertising on Instagram for beginners

Meta Platforms Inc., which owns the social networks Facebook and Instagram, was recognized as an extremist organization by a court decision dated March 21, 2022, and its activities in Russia are prohibited.

Instagram is one of the most popular social networks. As of April 2020, Mediascope estimates its monthly audience in Russia at 61 million people, 28 million of which check the feed daily. This is the fourth most popular social network, users spend an average of 30 minutes a day on it.

72% of users have an average or higher income level, 10.5% work in managerial positions. Instagram ads are the right tool to tell these people about your products and services.

WEB-Index Mediascope about the audience of Instagram

Instagram belongs to Facebook, so you can run ads here in two ways: through the Facebook advertising account and through the Instagram application itself. If you run ads through the Facebook advertising account, then you will have access to all the features of this tool: retargeting pixel, dynamic creatives, detailed statistics. When launched through the application, there are fewer opportunities, but the interface is simpler and it will be faster to launch ads. In this guide, we'll take a look at both tools.

Content:

Preparation
How Advertising works on Instagram
Register Account
We Connect the Business Profile
We fill out the Account

Run the advertisement through the Instagram
EXCHOUGE
We will prohibit the history Facebook
Creating a campaign and choosing a goal
Setting up an ad group
Making an ad

Subtleties of advertising on Instagram

We will summarize

Read also:

Promotion on Instagram yourself

Full guide on how promotion on Instagram

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How advertising on Instagram works

Advertising on Instagram is targeted. This means that you describe the target audience - its interests, geography of residence, demographic characteristics - and the social network looks for such and users and shows ads to them, and not to everyone in a row.

We have a step-by-step guide to working with Instagram for business. Let's recap the key steps you need to take to get your account ready to run ads.

Registering an account

If you plan to launch advertising through your Facebook account, then you may not need an Instagram account - a company page on Facebook is enough. But if you want to communicate with users directly on Instagram and show them more information about the company and products, then register an account for this.

You can create an account through an application on a smartphone or in a browser on a laptop or computer. To do this, you need mail, phone or Facebook account.

Registering an account in the app

If you don’t have the Instagram app on your smartphone yet, download it from the store:

Instagram on Google Play

Instagram on the App Store

to which you want to link your account. Enter the verification code, create a password, and enter your date of birth.

Registering an account in the browser

Open the registration page in the browser. You can log in to the social network with your Facebook account or create a new one. To do this, enter your phone number or email address, create a username and password. On the next screen, enter your date of birth, then the confirmation code that you will receive by mail or SMS.

The easiest way to use Instagram is from a mobile device, so we recommend downloading the app anyway.

Connecting business profile

A business profile is a commercial Instagram account linked to a company's Facebook page. It differs from the usual one in a set of additional features:

  • You can view statistics of publications and stories, detailed information on account subscribers: their geography and demographics, the number of subscriptions and unsubscriptions for the last week.
  • You can add information about the company: opening hours, address, phone number.
  • You can add a button for communication: when you click on it, the user will see your mail or be able to call immediately.

Compare what a regular profile and a business profile look like from the side of the account owner:

Regular profile

Business profile

burger menu in the upper right corner → "Settings" → "Account" → "Switch to professional account".

Instagram will clarify which category you belong to: "Author" or "Business". The first option is suitable if you are a blogger and develop a personal brand. If you have a company or a store, use the second one.

Specify which category your goods and services belong to, specify contact information. Then link your Facebook account and specify the business page that your Instagram profile will be linked to. If there is none, you can create it here.

Filling the business page will not affect the operation of the advertisement. It is worth paying attention to two points:

  • When creating a page on Facebook, indicate the correct category of your business, Instagram will use it for the business profile.
  • If you run ads through your Facebook account without an Instagram account, the system will use the cover and title of this business page in the feed, so it's better to choose a good avatar and name.

Creating and filling an account

Account name, avatar, name and description

Advertising can also be launched from an empty profile, but if a user becomes interested in an ad and opens a page with nothing on it, he may lose interest and leave. Therefore, we recommend filling in information about yourself - adding an avatar, name and profile description.

Pay attention to the avatar and title - this is what the user will immediately see in the feed of publications and stories. We recommend choosing those that will reflect the essence of your business, while being quite simple. For example:

Choose a suitable name - it will be displayed in the search under the account name. The name can contain up to 30 characters. It is worth adding keywords here: occupation, niche, geography and other characteristics that do not duplicate the account name. For example, “Land Law Lawyer” or “Fast Flower Delivery in St. Petersburg”.

Add a description for the account, it can be up to 150 characters long. Tell us what you do, add information about promotions and special offers, if necessary, indicate the hours of operation or the exact address.

A good description will help develop both the business account and the individual author. The account of the Keep Looking network is displayed one of the first on the request "Beauty salon". And the founder of the Generation Z online school develops a personal brand and tells why it is worth subscribing to.

First publications

If you have a new account, before launching an advertising campaign, place posts on a couple of scrolls with detailed information about goods or services, delivery terms, prices, and benefits. Show the product from different angles, share customer reviews.

These publications are needed to convince the user who went to your profile from advertising to buy your product, sign up for a service or order a service. So pay attention to the images, videos, and text you will be using.

In addition to posts, you can also post several stories at once and add them to Highlights, a feed of saved stories. Stories can be divided into groups, for example: product information, delivery information, reviews. Or a separate group for each category of goods or services.

For most products and services, keep in mind that the easier it is for a user to get additional information about your offer, the more likely the ad will work. The design of the profile in this regard works like a good landing page design - it does not convince by itself, but helps the visitor make a decision in your favor.

If you have a physical product, like Dodo Pizza or Boca furniture studio, tell us about it in the feed. If you have services, share cases, work principles or stories of employees like the Huge agency:

Dodo pizza feed

Boca furniture studio feed

Huge agency posts feed

As a result, you have an account with a suitable name, name and description, contacts are filled in, there are first publications and saved stories - it is easy for potential customers to understand what you offer and whether they are interested in it. Great, you are ready to start advertising.

Running ads through the Instagram app

If you have connected a business profile, you can run ads directly from the app on your smartphone. It’s convenient — it’s just a few clicks before the ad starts. On the other hand, there are fewer options available than when working with the Facebook account.

You can only promote posts and stories through the app that you already have in your account. So first post all the content you plan to promote. Please note that you can't promote IGTV posts right now.

Promoting the publication

Destination

Open the publication that we will use in advertising and click "Promote". If you are running ads for the first time, the application will tell you more about where you can send traffic: to your profile, to a website, or directly to direct. The first option is suitable if you want to attract new subscribers. The second is if you are promoting the site. The third is if you want to immediately engage the audience in communication, for example, so that they request a catalog.

Ivan's is an online course for students and recent graduates. On his Instagram account, he publishes useful materials on the subject of the course: potential students sign up, get acquainted with free materials, gain confidence and then pay for the course. The account has both native posts with tips and life hacks and commercial posts promoting products.

Ivan connected a business profile and filled out the feed:

On the one hand, advertising on Instagram for Ivan is an account development tool. So when promoting native publications, he specifies the profile as the destination: users see useful content and subscribe to the account. On the other hand, it is a source of traffic to the site. So in commercial publications, he sends customers to a landing page: users see an interesting offer and go to the site.

If you select a website as a destination, the application will pull up the address specified in the profile settings. Here you can also edit the call to action if you are sending traffic to the site. By default, it is "Details", you can choose another one, to do this, click on the small "Edit" link in the "Your site" item.

Select the appropriate text on the button and click Finish. Then - "Next" in the upper right corner on the screen for choosing a destination.

Room

Let's move on to setting up the audience that will see your ad. You can trust the algorithms and select the "Automatic" option, then the social network will look for users who are similar to the account's current subscribers. This is a convenient option if you have an organic and active base that is interested in your products and services - in this case, Instagram understands which users to look for.


If you don't have many followers yet, or if they follow you because of contests and not for your content, it's better to set up the audience yourself. To do this, select "Create your audience". Here you can specify the geography, interests, and demographics of your audience.

Specify the geography of potential customers in the "Locations" section. In the "Regional" tab, you can specify all the cities or countries that you plan to cover. In the "Local" tab, you can specify a specific address and the radius around it, from 1 to 30 kilometers. Convenient if you are looking for clients for a local business, such as a coffee shop or a beauty salon. Or if you have a limited delivery radius.

In the "Interests" section, in the free form, enter the interests for which you want to reach users. For example, "travelling", "cars", "raising children". Select the appropriate item, and the system will suggest similar interests.

Specify the age range and gender of the audience. For example, ads can be shown to women between 18 and 35 or men over 30.

Sometimes Ivan publishes entries that are aimed at readers from Moscow, and sometimes at those who live in the regions. When promoting different posts, it uses different geography settings. But interests usually do not change, its subscribers are actively interested in self-development, career, business.

"Places" is a mandatory section, "Interests" is an optional section. The application will tell you how many people match this set of descriptions. If the potential audience is small - usually less than 2500 users - the system will tell you that the potential reach is too narrow. Advertising in this case may be ineffective - few people will see it. To fix this, you can expand the geography and age range, or add additional interests.

Add a name and click "Finish" - the audience will be saved and you can use it for future campaigns.

Budget & Duration

Specify the daily budget for the campaign - from $80 to $20,000 - and the duration in days - from 1 to 30 days. low budget and short duration.


Ivan promotes each post from three to six days. He thinks so: less than three days is too short, the algorithm may not find the right audience. More than six days is a long time, the same people can come across the same post several times. And in the range from three to six, it is optimal: even if the algorithm shows campaigns to the same people, they will constantly see different content.

There are exceptions: if Ivan publishes a very important and viral post, or he announces a new product or event, then he runs the ad longer, up to 14 days. In this case, reach is important to him, and he does not worry about repeat impressions.

The campaign is ready to start. You can click "Promotion Preview" and see how users will see your ad in the feed, in stories, and in the "Interesting" section.

Add a PayPal card or account from which you will pay for advertising. Click "Payment", select a country and enter payment details. If you run ads from Russia, then keep in mind that the system will additionally charge VAT - 20% of advertising costs. That is, if the total campaign budget is 10,000 rubles, then in fact you will pay 12,000 rubles.

Click Create Promotion. The ad will go for moderation.


Promoting a story

Promoting a story works according to the same principle — choose one of the published stories, indicate the platform to which you want to lead customers, describe the audience, set the budget and send it for moderation.

You can promote a story that you have posted within the last 24 hours, that is saved in your Instagram Highlights or is archived. Open the story, click on the three dots in the bottom right corner and click Promote.

There are several restrictions when promoting a story:

  • You cannot promote stories with clickable elements: hashtags, polls, user marks.
  • Stories that may violate the rights of others, such as gifs or masks from the Instagram collection, cannot be promoted.
  • You can't promote stories that were published too long ago, the statute of limitations is about two years.

Tracking performance

You can track the results of your ads in the Promotions section of your profile page. For each promotion, the application will show the number of impressions, audience parameters, budget expenditure.

We launch advertising through the Facebook account

To launch advertising through the Facebook account, you need to set up a campaign, an ad group and the ad itself. At the same time, only Instagram must be specified in the placement settings of the ad group, then ads will not be shown on other sites. Let's go in order.

Read also:

A guide to launching Facebook ads for beginners

Understanding the intricacies of advertising on Facebook

Follow

If you haven't run ads on Facebook yet, first create an account. On any social network page, click on the arrow in the top bar and go to the "Facebook Ads" section. On the new page, click "Create an ad" in the top menu and accept the non-discrimination policy. After that, the "Manage ads" item in which your account is located will become available in your menu.

Click "Create" in your advertising account. During the launch of the first advertising campaign, the social network will ask you to specify additional parameters: your country of residence and time zone, the currency in which you will pay for advertising, and details of your PayPal card or account, QIWI wallet, Yandex. The money from which you will pay.

Creating a campaign and choosing a goal

The first step to launch an ad is choosing a goal. There are three categories to choose from: Awareness, Considerations, and Conversions.

Awareness is fine if you just want to talk about a new product. For example, Coca-Cola can announce a new flavor of soda in this way: they don’t so much need the user to go to the site, but so that he remembers the new label and remembers about it in the store.

"Consideration" is suitable if you want the user to become interested in the product and somehow interact with the advertisement: watch the video, go to the site, like it, install the application that you are promoting.

"Conversions" is suitable if you want users to perform a specific action on the site: register for an event, put an item in a cart, leave a request. For ads to work effectively, you will need to set up the transmission of events from your site to your ad account.

The logic of the algorithm depends on the goal you choose — which user it will show ads to. For example, if you select the "Traffic" objective, then the algorithm will show the ad to those users who are more likely to click on a button or link. It works like this: the system will show ads to the first group of users and mark those who take the desired action. And then, according to various parameters, it will look for others who are similar to them in profile and behavior and will also follow the link with a high probability.

Alexey has an online flower shop with a pickup point on Taganskaya. Instagram for him is a way to attract customers to the site, talk about products. Alex uses the "Traffic" objective to get as many clicks to the site as possible. Let's see what other settings he uses for promotion.

Add the name of the campaign. For campaigns, ad groups, and ads, it's best to use names that you can refer to in the future. If all campaigns are called "Advertising", then to find the right one and fix something in it, you will have to make a lot of clicks. Use a clear description in the title, such as "Outreach campaign in Moscow, August" or "Traffic to the site by interests / Regions".

Check whether you will conduct an A/B test as part of the campaign. If yes, then you will be prompted to create different ad groups that may differ in design, placements, and audiences.

Specify how you plan to manage the budget: at the level of the entire campaign or each individual ad group in this campaign. That is, set a general limit for all groups at once, or a separate limit for each group. If you choose to optimize the budget of the entire campaign, then specify the daily or total campaign budget and the bidding strategy you want to use.

If this is your first time setting up ads, click the "Set up ad account" button. Facebook will ask you to enter your country, currency, and time zone. If you have already created advertising campaigns, click "Continue".

Set up the ad group

The next step is to set up the ad group. Ads in the same group will have the same audience and placements. If you want to create ads for a different audience segment, you can create a new ad set within the same campaign. For example, one ad group for school supplies might be for students and another for their parents.

Enter a name for the ad group. Choose where you plan to send traffic: to a website, to an app page, or to a conversation in Messenger or WhatsApp.

You can check "Dynamic creatives" if you have multiple options for images and accompanying text. The advertising system will show users different options and determine the most effective ones.

Specify the parameters of the audience to which you want to show ads: their geo-, demographic characteristics. Click "Edit" next to "Detailed targeting" to specify additional parameters: interests, education level, marital status, devices used, and others. In the block on the right, the system will show what audience size you can potentially reach.


Aleksey knows that his main clients are women from Moscow who are already thinking about home comfort and are interested in gardening and interior design. Alex uses this information to set up audience settings.

In the "Placements" section, select the "Manually select placements" item. In the block that opens, uncheck the "Facebook", "Audience Network" and "Messenger" platforms. You can then choose where on Instagram you want your ads to appear: in the main feed, Explore feed, or Stories.

If you didn't select budget optimization at the campaign level in the previous step, then in the "Budget and Schedule" section, specify a daily or total budget and bid strategy. For some purposes, for example, "Traffic", you can specify a control price - this is your expectation of a price per action: click, install, button click. The final cost may vary, but the system will take into account your expectations when selecting places to display your ad.

Click Continue.

Making an announcement

Enter the name of the announcement. In the "Company identification" block, select on behalf of which page you place ads. If an Instagram account is linked to this page, you can select it in the "Instagram Account" section. If not, then you can promote ads from a Facebook page.

If you have specified an Instagram account, you can select one of the publications existing in it or create a new one. If you create a new post, it will not be reflected in your account - this is convenient if you do not want to show sponsored posts in your profile feed.

You can use the "Carousel" format, which consists of several objects and captions, or "Single image or video".

Upload media objects: pictures and videos. Click "Add Media" and choose from already uploaded media or add new ones. If you plan to advertise in Stories, upload a separate image with an aspect ratio of 9:16 for this purpose.

Add ad text, provide a link, select a call to action to be displayed in the ad. If you chose the Carousel format, then add them for each card.

Please note: if there are two or three cards in the gallery, the user will see all of them when advancing in stories. And if there are more cards, then the user will see the first three, and the "Open story" button will appear in the interface. A person will see the rest of the cards only if he clicks on it. The link is invisible, so some users may not see other creatives.

Aleksey uses a gallery for advertising: this way you can show more plants and some of them will surely interest a potential client. He adds a short description to each image: what kind of plant it is, who will like it, what interior it will suit. For example: “Unpretentious, but spectacular: suitable for owners who are not ready to spend a lot of time on care, but want to please the eye every day. It will fit perfectly into a bright, spacious interior.

If you have an online store on Tilda and a product catalog is connected, you can automatically generate a gallery from it.

Select whether you want to collect information about users who see and interact with ads using the Facebook pixel.

Click Confirm. The ad will be sent for moderation.

Promotion with the help of the Facebook advertising account provides flexible opportunities for experimenting with advertising. We talked about them in a detailed guide to advertising on Facebook, pay attention to:

Pixel. It will help to save information about users who have already seen your ad and interacted with it or performed a certain action on the site.

Catalog. It will be useful if you have an online store and want to promote your products.

Dynamic creatives. The tool will be useful if you have a lot of ideas for advertising design, but you don't know which ones will work best.

The subtleties of advertising on Instagram

Advertising on Instagram must comply with the same rules as on other Facebook sites. Here are a few more recommendations that the social network gives for setting up ads.

Use a separate image format for Stories ads

Don't use the same media for feed and story ads. Prepare a separate version of the creative with a 9:16 aspect ratio and use it for ads in stories. And for the ribbon, leave the standard rectangular or square image. Please note that if you promote the gallery through the Facebook interface, then the images in the feed can only be square.

Do not overuse text on creatives

Facebook has a negative attitude towards images, more than 20% of which are text. This can lead to the fact that ads will scroll more slowly and fewer users will see them. It is better to put the text in the description, and leave the image clean.

Consider the interface

If the image has text at the very bottom or top of the screen, the interface elements will overlap it: the profile icon on the top, the call to action on the bottom. To prevent this from happening, place them at a distance of 14-15% of the height from the top and bottom edges. If you are using an image that is 1600 pixels tall, back off 220-250 pixels.

Don't forget that the user can turn off the sound

If you decide to promote the video, don't forget that the user can view it without sound. If you plan to convey important thoughts with your voice, then duplicate them with subtitles so as not to lose such users.

Check your account statistics

See which of your posts get the most engagement: likes, comments, bookmarks. It is probably worth using such recordings for advertising - they resonate most with your audience.

Promote new products, services, and offers

Instagram promotion is a way to promote an upcoming sale, new product launch, or special offer. Advertising will help convey information about the new product to an audience that may be interested in it.

Don't delay when using video in Stories

A story is only 15 seconds long - don't put off showcasing your product or brand. If you use a long introduction, then some users may simply go to the next publications and not even figure out what you offer them.

Show, don't tell

Show users the product in action: how other people use it, what are the non-standard uses for it, tell how you work on it. Tell a story, not just describe the benefits of a product.

To summarize

Advertising on Instagram can be launched in two ways: through the Facebook advertising account and directly in the Instagram application.

Prepare your account for launching ads: add an avatar, description, website link, contacts. Post several posts that will help users get to know your offer better.

Switch your account to a business profile. To do this, you need to link your Instagram profile to a Facebook page. It will take just a few clicks, but additional features will open up: you can view statistics, add information about the company, and run ads through the application.

Only posts and stories that have already been published can be promoted through the app.

Learn more