Instagram is one of the leading visual content platforms. In June 2016, the number of active users exceeded five hundred million people, more than eighty million new posts are published every day. The service gives users the ability to instantly transfer data and has a lot of advantages over other platforms. In the context of advertising, the platform is useful in that the content on Instagram has a very high virality compared to other networks.
Advertising campaigns here are effective due to the huge size of the audience, so the inclusion of this social network in any marketing strategy will be an excellent business decision. This article is a detailed overview of how to run ads on Instagram.
The target audience
The opportunity to launch advertising appeared on October 1, 2015. In Russia, the user audience is nine million, the bulk of which are young people (15-25 years old). The number of men and women is approximately the same. Before launching targeted advertising on Instagram, it’s worth considering the main feature of this platform - the ability to share beautiful photos with users and motivate their discussion. This advertising format is especially useful for online stores, restaurants, furniture stores. In a word, to everyone who has good quality graphic content.
Ad Types
For those who want to launch targeted advertising on Instagram, the instructions on the site will tell you to familiarize yourself with the types of ads. There are two of them: static and dynamic ("carousel"). A static ad is a regular post, while a dynamic ad will allow the advertiser to create a feed of photos that the user can navigate through.
Targets and goals
How to start advertising on Instagram and make it work? It is necessary to set certain tasks and clear goals. For example, it can be the formation of brand awareness, increase in sales, attracting visitors to the site, leads for the campaign, additional conversions on the site, stimulating interest in products, promoting the catalog, likes and sharing, increasing the number of application installations, watching videos, attending communities and events .
The success of targeted advertising on Instagram depends only on the advertiser himself and on his ability to properly build promotion work. You need to know how this platform works, but except for this, you need a fresh idea, which can be a decisive moment in the success of the entire campaign. In addition, before you start advertising on Instagram through Facebook, you should tidy up the site and evaluate the chances, make sure that you have everything you need. The presence of a brand or service, quality design, an account on Facebook (you can create ads only from this social network).
Customization
Now let's talk about how to launch an advertisement on Instagram step by step. Work begins with registration with the Facebook business manager. This allows you to create a public relations campaign and open access to it even for those who do not have a Facebook account. Then you need to register an account through Instagram through the business manager and attach it to the advertising project through the "Assign advertising accounts" function. After that, it becomes possible to proceed directly to the creation of an advertising campaign.
In the settings you need to specify one of the goals that this advertisement pursues: clicks on the site, watching videos, installing a mobile application. You can then change other primary settings, such as the name of the ad, group, and so on. Next, a window appears for entering detailed information. At the campaign level, a budget is set - the amount that will be spent on a specific PR campaign. In the ad groups, the expense for each of them is indicated, and you can register not only the daily expense for the entire group, but also scheduled stops and starts.
When getting acquainted with the settings, many users have a question about what an audience pixel is. Behind this term is a special JavaScript code that can be placed on the site. It collects data about site visitors and sends information about user actions directly to your Facebook account. Will the audience’s pixel help in tracking after launching Instagram ads on Facebook? More than! It is this tool that will allow the advertiser to show ads only to those visitors who have performed a specific action on the site or visited the necessary pages. You can also view your site’s statistics directly on Facebook.
The main settings are made, but before you start advertising on Instagram yourself, you still need to decide on the parameters of the target audience. The interface allows you to select existing groups of audiences, which greatly simplifies the task, especially if there are a lot of ads or campaigns, but the settings are flexible, you can create a new group that is more suitable for the goals of the campaign.
How to determine the target audience? The advertiser must clearly understand who will be interested in the proposed product. The simplest method will be to create the image of a “typical buyer”, after which the question of audience parameters will not be raised. For example, who would be interested in a proposal for targeted advertising on Instagram and instructions on how to launch it? Such an audience can be very wide, but the announcement will not cause interest among people who do not have their own business, a selling group or an income-generating hobby. Such a behavioral attribute is worth pointing out.
The audience settings are very flexible, in addition to the location, interests, age and behavioral characteristics are indicated. We give one more example.
Location: Moscow and Moscow region.
Interests: computer servers, computer network, remote administration programs, intrusion prevention system, information security, small business, computer security.
Behavior: small business owners.
Age: 23-45 years old.
This is one of the default settings. All saved groups can be viewed in the "Tools" tab. Do not rely on any one group, test different audiences to identify the most effective strategy. Create several ads for different audiences: practice shows that narrow targeting and creative promise will become the key to the success of advertising on Instagram.
How to start and how much does it cost?
After determining the audience, you can select a payment model. For most cases, an optimized CPM model is suitable. The price of a particular ad will depend not only on the type of ad selected, but also on the content and its quality. Facebook has specific requirements for graphic content. Image size is recommended 1080 x 1080 pixels, and the format is one to one. The image should not include more than twenty percent of the text.
Next, you need to set the action button and select the purpose of the advertising campaign. It can be formed in the "Conversion Pixels" menu. UMT tags are required for all advertisements, otherwise it will be impossible to follow the advertising campaign in analytics from Google and Yandex.Metrica. To view the report, go to the Traffic Sources section.
By the way, do not forget that there are many tips on how to run ads on Instagram, instructions for setting up and prices are on the platform itself, so you can refresh everything in your memory right away when creating an advertising campaign.
In the photo below, an example of advertising from a vegetarian food brand.
Common mistakes
Having learned how to launch an advertisement on Instagram, many wonder why the ads did not pass moderation? Usually, moderators report some violations that are in this announcement, but eliminating them at the very first stages will significantly reduce the time. Even the smallest violation of the rules can cause a rejection, as moderators carefully and manually check each ad. It should be borne in mind that the time of such a check can take up to twenty-four hours or even more.
The most common reason for disapproval of ads is excessive text in the images. As mentioned above, the text in the picture should occupy no more than twenty percent of the volume. Of course, the introduction of textual information makes the ad more informative, but at the same time it reduces the overall attractiveness and quality. The requirement applies to absolutely all types of advertising posts, even to thumbnail videos. Use the grid tool to find out if the ad meets the requirement.
Also, before launching on Instagram an advertisement for a review, channel or site advertising a product with age restrictions, it should be checked that the selected audience clearly meets these restrictions. For example, moderators will not post an advertisement for tobacco or alcohol products if the age of the audience chosen to show is less than eighteen years old.
How to run an advertisement on Instagram through Facebook with the correct "links"? Some ads require the advertiser to link to Facebook, and in order to comply with this rule, remember that the name must be indicated in the original, that is, Facebook, in English and in the capital F. The word must have the same font, size letters and writing style, as with the surrounding text, should not be in bold.
You can’t use the logo instead of the signature, or change the word in any way (for example, put in the plural or abbreviate). If instead of the original one in the ad there is a modified version of the logo, such an advertisement will also be rejected.
Paid Services
Any business has its own nuances, and it happens that there is absolutely no time to understand them. In this case, the easiest way to trust specialists who are involved in promoting communities on social networks. Of course, such services appeared for Instagram. One of the most popular services is InstaPlus and Aitarget. How to launch an advertisement on Instagram without turning off Adblock or antivirus? Unfortunately, when working with such services you will have to disable almost all protection. About this they warn in advance. To fear this or trust third-party software is a personal matter for each user.
Testing
Hubspot experts (a popular software service that has a large selection of tools for Internet marketing) conducted their own advertising tests on Instagram. Below is a diagram of this testing and the results.
Hubspot tested photos, text and media types. Evaluation of the effectiveness of advertising is carried out using special metrics, such as the number of clicks and likes, CPC, CTR (click-through rate), cost of lead, CPM (cost per thousand impressions), cost of viewing. The test involved text and three types of media content in advertising (carousel, static image and video).
Among the photographs there were six different types: a picture with a clear call to action, stock photos, a bait for clicks (cute photographs, such as cats that are not related to the advertised product), images containing some of the information that the user will receive after clicking on the ad. The test also involved natural looking photographs, which the user could easily put in his personal "Instagram" and images with a statement or quote.
As a test for textual content, several types of text were also used to describe ads. Here are some examples.
Title: "How to run an advertisement on Instagram for business." The headline is a text addressed to the reader that explains what benefit he will receive when downloading or moving.
A call to action may be a text with the following content: "Check the data from this article on personal experience, run an advertisement on Instagram and pump your business."
Often among the ads there are also humorous, entertaining texts that are only partially related to the advertised product.
In the Hubspot test, the same image was used for all texts.
Received data
The results were as follows. The cheapest type of advertising is images with clear calls to action, they are 45% cheaper than stock photos, but at the same time they have a high CTR (twice as much as advertising with stock photos).
Stock photos have the lowest CTR, but the highest CPC. Image ads have the highest cost-per-click, and photo-bait ads are the cheapest in the cost-per-click.
conclusions
Call-to-action advertising is one of the most effective in terms of price / quality ratio. In the test, she proved to be the least expensive and got the most clicks compared to other types of advertising. Experts concluded that Instagram users love ads with a clear call to action, because they clearly understand what they’ll get after clicking on the link.
Instagram is picky about the quality of advertising content to make the platform look natural.
Web photos are of little interest to Web users; it’s best not to use them in advertising.
Natural photos, looking like regular Instagram posts, also didn’t show themselves very well in advertising, although Hubspot suggested the opposite. Perhaps the fact is that simple photos on the platform are not clickable, and users simply did not notice a click button on these advertising posts. Based on this, the advertiser must make an announcement so that the visitor immediately understands what they are offering.
"Bait for clicks" - cute photos that have nothing to do with the main content, showed themselves in two ways. On the one hand, they gained four times as many likes as regular ads. On the other hand, it can scare away part of the audience.
The results of the texts are such that a clear call to action here also showed the best result. Before deciding how to run an advertisement on Instagram, a marketer should spend time thinking about a phrase that motivates the user to click on the advertisement.
This test is just one of many. Perhaps in some other audience he would have shown different results, so it can be taken into account, but not be guided as an absolute truth. The best option is to independently check the strategies and identify the most effective for this audience and this product. However, in any case, the quality of the content and the unobtrusiveness of advertising play the most important role.