The decade before instagram stories gained heat-momentum worldwide, there was Snapchat and so Facebook. And there could be more!
After that world-shaken, millions of social media geeks and lovers switched to Instagram and the number continues to grow.
Basically, Instagram is an American origin photo and video-sharing double the fun-entertainment social media application that was launched in 2010 by Kevin Systrom.
A few years later, leading social media giant – Facebook owned Instagram, paying an attractive settlement of nearly to $1 billion in 2012, a shocking sum at that time for a company with 13 employees.
On this date, Instagram has catastrophic numbers of users with an average of 500 million daily active users accessing the Instagram app globally. Beyond this, the total number of instagram users worldwide is nearly sumed in June 2021 is 964.3 million.
Table of Contents
Look At These Shocking Instagram Statistics (The Second Most Used Social Media App)
There is no doubt in saying that Instagram gives us shocking news and thereby a host of entertainment and educational to commercial and other informative content yearly and most of them stayed on the top of the charts.
Here’s some glimpse of surprising Instagram statistics pulled from statista.com
Countries with the most Instagram users 2021
Instagram: number of global users 2016-2023
Distribution of Instagram users worldwide as of July 2021, by age group
Are you thinking about running ads on Instagram? Want to market your product and service on the Instagram social media platform? Want to increase website traffic, increase in sales conversion, and increase ROI?
Then I would extremely recommend you to run Instagram Ads niche to your business and targeted for customers.
Since Instagram is owned by Facebook, you can either run, manage, and interpret each and every post analytics using Facebook ad manager or directly using the Instagram app.
It is simple and easy to run advertisements on Instagram. Even though it took me five minute to run my first instagram post. That was an outstanding experience!
In this blog you will learn in detail about Instagram paid Advertisement, how to run ads on instagram using facebook ad manager along with its various ad formats.
So, stick to my blog. And keep reading…!
What Is Instagram Advertising?
Advertising means paying money against your sponsored content! Right
Similarly, Instagram Ads or Instagram Advertising is a method of paying to each several-curated post sponsored content on the Instagram platform with diversifying aims but commonly it is done to reach a larger and more targeted audience.
On the other hand, there could be more versatile reasons a business or sole-user may decide to run ads on instagram be it utilized to grow brand exposure, website traffic, generate new leads, and more.
Instagram is different from other aspects of social media platforms. It is different from Facebook, it is likely diverse from linkedin, and so others.
It is true that anyone can use instagram ads for achieving business-oriented results, but, speaking honestly, it does not work for every industry.
Look at this statistic…! What do you learn?
The most loved and liked instagram post is about ‘photo of an egg’ with 55.1 million number of likes which shows foodie-lover users. Thus running ads by food bloggers or restaurant business is worth the pay off.
Similarly for the others….
Hey! But this doesn’t mean at all you can’t run ads and expect good results – go ahead, run your first ads on Instagram with confidence.
Is Instagram Advertising Right for Your Business?
Gossh! This question annoys me every time when asked!
Simply put, ask your kids – do they have an instagram account? If yes, then you got the answer.
Surprisingly, Instagram has the largest percentage of users falling in the age range of 18-29 (55%), then between 30-49 years-old (28%). Besides, the percentage of older people is very occasional, said to be just 4% to 11%.
After all, in the modern days, the modern business is all about giving niche consideration to younger people rather than the old age population.
Based on the research conducted by Hootsuite, the report demonstrates that the majority of Instagram users live in urban areas (32 percent), 28% of users live in the suburbs, and 18% of users in the country.
Advertisement is all about customers, after all they are the end users of your product and services. With these notes, Instagram is worth the option of running advertisements and will give you a good return, often not frequently but definitely.
How Much Do Instagram Ads Cost?
Instagram ads don’t work as a real market where a person pays a peculiar amount for the product and happily walks out with the ownership.
It is hard to tell how much it would cost to run ads on instagram. Because this is a tricky question to answer.
See, cost involves a variety of factors, and as you may have witnessed these factors are not all revealed to us by the platform.
Simply put, Instagram ads work on the model called CPC (cost-per-click) and CPM’s (cost per impressions), and prices are determined according to Instagram’s ad auction.
Recently, Andrew Tate from AdEspresso once in an interview said that “The cost of Instagram ads are influenced by many factors — everything from your audience to your ad feedback is judged.”
It is also noticed that Instagram ads cost you higher than Facebook ads prices. Majority of the community believe that Instagram ads often have higher engagement, but this can cost them.
However, Instagram gives you the freedom to optimize your ad spend via multiple scenarios. Here’s the reasons –
- Advertisers do have control over how their budgets are allocated.
- Ad scheduling methods also help you control your Instagram ad spend.
- Advertisers can choose between a daily budget to limit the amount spent per day or a lifetime budget.
In conclusion, it is universal to ‘pay and get’ unless and until you don’t invest you won’t get a return – and that’s the business tactic.
Instagram ad costs are economical and feasible and you believe once you try it yourself.
So, let’s get started with Advertising on Instagram.
6 Easy Steps to Start Advertising on Instagram
Yeah! we‘re finally here!
Learn the flaws of instagram ads and the various ins and outs that should be done while preparing for instagram ads.
If you ever run ads on Facebook then it’s good news for you that learning about advertising on Instagram is easy and there is’t much to learn.
And in case you didn’t do it, I’ve derived the process below you can follow it and learn advertising on instagram quickly.
1. Navigate to Facebook’s Ad Manager
You need to sign in first to access Facebook’s ad manager. To navigate to the ad manager simply follow the link [here] and you will be on the dashboard from where you can manage everything.
(note* there is no specific Ad Manager for Instagram; Instagram ads are managed through the Facebook Ads UI)
2. Set Your Marketing Objective
You need to set your marketing goals that you expect from your post. In case you slip from your idea, the ad manager gives you the option to set appropriate marketing goals.
Need more traffic? Select the traffic goal. Looking to increase brand awareness? Choose the brand awareness goal.
Following are the detailed list of marketing objectives that it offers:
- Brand awareness
- Reach Traffic
- App installs
- Engagement (for post engagement only*)
- Video views
- Conversions (for conversions on your website or app*)
3. Configure Your Target Audience
The next vital thing to consider is setting the right audience for your post type.
The success of your instagram post is diligently depend on the right target audience. Thus, configure your target audience wisely.
Tha Ad manager gives you multiple aspects to filter your niche audience ranging from location, age, and gender to demographics and behaviours.
Here’s the brief of each target audience filtration:
Location: Whether you want to target a country, region, state, city, zip code.
Age: Allows you to target ranges from age 13 to 65+
Gender: Choose between all, men, or women
Demographics: Under “Detailed Targeting” you’ll find demographics, which has several sub-categories.
Interests: Interests is also under “Detailed Targeting” with multiple sub-categories to dig into.
Behaviors: And yet another “Detailed Targeting” option with multiple sub-categories to explore.
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.
Lookalike Audience: If your custom audience is tapped to their potential, create a lookalike audience.
After filling the above ad needs, Facebook automatically provides you with a guide to how specific or broad your audience is (like the one below).
Remember, your targeted audience range should be in the green metered area, this shows the good latency rate of achieving ad post objectives.
4. Choose Your Placements
Ad placement is nothing but the indication to the advertisers where they can place their ads in the chosen platforms. When given the preferable placements to the ads, the ad manager will only show them at the chosen arena.
Additionally, you can specifically create placements for instagram, you should select “Edit Placements” here.
Moreover, 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
Now here comes an intellectual job – setting your budget and ad schedule. Ad Schedule is the time for how long your ad will be run and seen on the given platform.
Above you can see clearly you have the separate option for ‘Budget’ and ‘Ad Schedule’.
In the Budget section, you can go from daily to lifetime. Typically, daily budgets guarantee your budgets won’t be spent too quickly.
Coming to the Ad Schedule section, you have two options: ‘Run ads all the time’ and ‘Run ads on a schedule’. Given your preference you can either go for any one option.
When choosing a custom ad schedule delivery you have to be careful in selecting the days because it affects the visualization and reachness of the audience.
6. Create Your Instagram Ad
Lastly, you have to define your ad post visualization. This involves, not widescope but three Ads format – (i) Single image, (ii) Single video, and (iii) Slideshow
You need to choose one ad format from the scripted menu and be conscious because it needs to be defined depending upon your campaign objective.
Let’s look briefly into the various Instagram Ads format specs.
Advertising on Instagram: Know These Instagram Ad Formats
Instagram has six ad formats to choose from. Two of those are for Instagram stories, which appear at the top of the feed, and the remaining four are formats designed for the Instagram feed, which are more commonly used by advertisers.
A) Image Feed Ads
This is the most common Instagram ad format that includes single images that will appear as a native experience and are placed likely the one you see most often scrolling through your own feed.
Specification(s):
- 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
- Hashtag Number: 30 maximum
B) Image Story Ads
Instagram stories are in the form of videos and photos, when uploaded it gives you multiple filters to make your post even more gorgeous.
Specification(s):
- Image Ratio: 9:16 recommended
- Minimum Image Width: 600 pixels
C) Video Feed Ads
Videos are a great way to tell about your product in detail featuring visuals. If you put great time in making quality videos, then it is definitely worth putting on the Instagram video feeds ads.
Specification(s):
- 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
- Visual Captions: optional
- Image Ratio: 4:5 minimum, 16:9 maximum
- Text length: 125 characters maximum recommended
- Hashtag Number: 30 maximum
D) Video Story Ads
This is another great place to run video ads, because 95% of Instagram users are caved to watch others’ videos stories. And this could be the perfect ‘selling’ part of advertising.
Specification(s):
- Video Resolution: 1080 x 1920 pixels (at least)
- Maximum file size: 4GB
- Video Ratio: 9:16 maximum
- Video Duration: 15 seconds maximum
- Visual Captions: not available
E) Carousel Feed Ads
Carousel posts are also very popular on Instagram. This format allows you to show a series of scrollable images rather than just one single image.
This type of ad format is best suitable for brands like food industry, furniture sellers, clothing options, vacation destinations, car dealerships, etc.
The advantage of running this type of ad is that it allows you to choose from up to 10 images within a single ad, each with its own link.
Specification(s):
- 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
- Video Duration: 60 seconds maximum
- Hashtag Number: 30 maximum
F) Canvas Story Ads
These are little different from all other types of Instagram ad formats, as this is the newest addition to the ad format family, Canvas ads.
The unique thing about this ad type is that it creates a 360 VR experience within their story. Currently, you find this option only from Instagram mobile apps. Additionally, these ads work with image, video, and carousel.
Specification(s):
- Minimum Image Width: 400 pixels
- Minimum Image Height: 150 pixels
To understand Instagram Ad format and its specification clearly, I’ve shared this comprehensive infographic pointing to the various aspects of ad types and format with its specification.
Bonus Tip: 5 Instagram Advertising Best Practices
Now that you have gained some serious guidance related to advertising on Instagram.
Assuming that you have learned them well, let’s move to the Instagram best practices that will help you create stunning and great Instagram Ads.
No.1 – Create Each Ad With Essence of Personality
It is useless if your post fails to offer personalization to your audience. Wheter posting funny goofy image, an emotional video, and sliding images showing off your culture will all dumb and equal to gargabe, if your Instagram post doesn’t feel humanized.
No.2 – Make Sure Your Ad Is Contextually Relevant
What works with one online media stage will not really work with another. The equivalent goes for Instagram. Put yourself in your target purchaser’s shoes and know about where they are.
No.3 – Use Trendy and Relevant Hashtags For Your Post
A post without hashtags may have a lesser engagement ratio than those having hashtags in it.
TrackMaven analyzed 65,000 posts and found that 9 hashtags is the ideal number for highest post engagement.
No.4 – Run a Contest
Advancing a content or giveaway is by a long shot perhaps the best approach to arrive at your objectives quicker with Instagram advertising. Why? Since individuals love rivalry and free stuff!
No.5 – Post At Optimal Time
Many people are confused here and ask about the importance of Instagram Ad post timing. Does it matter?
Honestly, nope, but certainly there are days and even hours where you see the aggression in Instagram users. They are more active! And that you can consider in your Instagram Ad schedule.
Instagram Paid Advertisement: Conclusion
I only think that every social media comes with its pros and cons, considering Instagram for Ads could be a serious matter of talk for your business – yes or no!
Instagram has some disadvantages but that’s not make it weaker. Although there is an increase in the number of daily active users, Instagram is and for sure covers a brighter future for business.
In the end, I can only say without trying you can propagate your words, so follow this guide, feel energized and go for Instagram Ads.
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