Instagram ads are open to every business: a practical guide

Instagram ran ads for a small list of large brands from late 2013 and kept it invitation-only for almost two years. In June it announced that ads would open to all advertisers through Facebook's tools, and the rollout finished at the end of September, with availability in more than 30 countries including the US.

Three things came with it:

• Self-serve buying through Power Editor, Ads Manager and the Facebook ads API, with the same campaign, ad set and ad structure you already use.
• Facebook targeting. Instagram accounts are increasingly linked to Facebook profiles, so demographics, interests, Custom Audiences and Lookalikes all apply.
• Direct response objectives. Until recently Instagram ads were mostly for awareness. Now you can buy for website clicks, conversions, app installs and video views, with a call-to-action button on the ad.

With roughly 400 million monthly users globally and a user base that skews younger than Facebook's, this is the first time a mid-sized business can reach that audience with paid media at scale.

Photo ads. A single image in the feed with a caption and an optional call-to-action button such as Shop Now, Learn More, Install Now or Sign Up. Square 1080 by 1080 is the native size. Landscape 1.91:1 is also accepted and gives you a Facebook-compatible asset, but it takes up less screen.

Video ads. Up to 30 seconds, square or landscape, autoplaying without sound. Assume the viewer never turns audio on. The first two seconds need movement and a visible product or face, and anything spoken should also appear as text or be unnecessary.

Carousel ads. Up to four images a viewer swipes through, each with the same destination link via a single call to action. Good for a product range, a before-and-after sequence, or a short story in frames. Early reports from Facebook suggest carousel can lower cost per click relative to single images where the product has several angles worth showing.

There is also Marquee, a premium one-day takeover placement for very large launches. It is sold separately at a reservation price that puts it out of reach for most businesses, and it is not what this article is about.

This is the part that makes Instagram ads usable rather than merely available. Everything you have built on Facebook transfers.

1. Website Custom Audiences. If the Facebook pixel is on your site, you can retarget visitors and cart abandoners on Instagram today. This is the first campaign most businesses should run, because the audience already knows you and the creative can be specific.
2. Customer list Custom Audiences. Upload emails or phone numbers. Match rates are typically lower than on Facebook itself because fewer Instagram accounts are linked, but they are improving.
3. Lookalike Audiences. Build from your best customers, pick 1 percent of the US as a starting size.
4. Interest and demographic targeting. Workable, broad, and best used with a layered interest and an age range rather than alone.

Keep placements separate. Facebook will happily put the same ad set across news feed, mobile, Audience Network and Instagram, and the blended reporting hides what Instagram is actually doing. Create an ad set with Instagram as the only placement so you can read its cost and its conversion rate on their own.

Most early failures on Instagram are creative, not targeting. The feed is a stream of photographs people chose to look at. An ad that looks like an ad breaks the rhythm and gets skipped.

Make it look like a good post. Natural light, real settings, a product in use. Studio shots on white backgrounds perform poorly unless the product itself is the point.

Keep text off the image. Facebook's 20 percent text rule applies to Instagram ads, and even within the rule, text-heavy images read as banners.

Write a caption, not a headline. The first 125 characters show before the "more" cut. Put the point there. Hashtags are allowed but do not help distribution on a paid post and clutter the caption.

Use the call-to-action button. It is the only tappable link. The caption URL is not clickable, which trips up advertisers who copy Facebook copy over.

Match the ad to the landing page. Instagram is almost entirely mobile. If your landing page is slow on a phone or the checkout is painful, you will pay for clicks that go nowhere. The mobile-friendly work many businesses did this spring pays off here.

Produce more variations than you think you need. Instagram creative fatigues fast within a small audience. Plan on refreshing images every two to three weeks for retargeting audiences.

For a business with a product or service that sells online, a reasonable four-week test looks like this:

• Week 1–2: One ad set, Instagram placement only, Website Custom Audience of the last 30 days of visitors. Three photo ads, one carousel. Objective: website conversions, optimized for the pixel event that matters. Budget $25 to $50 per day.
• Week 2–4: Add a second ad set, 1 percent Lookalike of purchasers or leads, same creative plus one 15-second video. Budget $30 to $75 per day.
• Throughout: Compare cost per result with the same audiences on Facebook news feed. Instagram CPMs are higher; the question is whether click quality makes up for it.

Expect CPMs in the $5 to $10 range, click-through rates between 0.5 and 1.5 percent for well-matched retargeting, and lower for cold audiences. If you cannot measure conversions because the pixel is not firing correctly, fix that before spending a dollar.

• Running Instagram inside a mixed-placement ad set and concluding it "doesn't work" from blended numbers.
• Pointing the button at a desktop-only landing page.
• Treating it as a branding channel only. The direct response objectives exist; use them and measure.
• Ignoring comments. Ads get comments like any post, and unanswered questions under a paid post are visible to everyone you paid to reach.
• Repurposing a 30-second TV cut with the audio carrying the message.

We begin with discovery: what the pixel captures, which audiences already exist on Facebook, and what visual assets the brand has that would survive in an Instagram feed. From that we plan a test that keeps Instagram placements isolated and sets a cost-per-result threshold before launch. Build means producing creative for the format, square photography and short silent video, rather than resizing existing banners, and setting up the campaign structure so the numbers are readable. Then we improve weekly, rotating creative, expanding the audiences that work, and feeding what we learn back to the brand and web teams, because a channel like this exposes landing page and brand issues fast.

A representative engagement is the performance marketing program we run for a consumer business that already had a working Facebook retargeting setup. Adding Instagram as a separately measured placement, with creative shot for the feed instead of borrowed from the catalog, gave the client a new source of mobile conversions at an acceptable cost and a clear read on where it beat Facebook news feed and where it did not. The discipline of isolating the placement and refreshing creative on a schedule was what made the results trustworthy.