What to Do If You Want to Advertise on Instagram

Instagram is a social media platform that has gradually gained fame with time, but now it’s fair to say that it is one of the most popular ones. In fact, it’s garnered 500 million active monthly users. In turn, this has given marketers a huge user base to work with in order to find and reach out to their target audience. The beauty, though, of advertising on Instagram is the fact that the ads aren’t invasive as they aren’t any different than the normal posts. However, just like advertising on Facebook, or any other platform for that matter, you need to think about things such as who your target audience is, what your copy should say, which images you should use, as well as how long your ad should run for. However, don’t let the process overwhelm you. In fact, we are here to help you make it as easy as possible.

How to Advertise on Instagram

Start by either logging on or creating a Facebook Page and select the account that you’d like to use. Don’t let the fact that everything is run on Facebook scare you. If you weren’t aware, Facebook actually owns Instagram, so they’re now merged. Therefore, everything regarding advertising is done on Facebook, whether it be ad setup, budgeting, scheduling, or creation; the whole nine-yards happens there. That’s why, if you’ve set up a Facebook ad before, then you’re in luck as you are more than halfway on the road to completion.

Your next step is to choose an editor and make your campaign. In order to make an Instagram ad, you can choose between either the Ads Manager, the Power Editor, or Facebook Ads API. Your choice should be based on the size of your business as well as the number of ads that you want to run simultaneously. As soon as you’ve made your selection, it’s time to choose an objective. There are several that you can choose from, but for those interested in advertising on Instagram, then the list is shorter, a few of which include boosting your post and increasing conversions on your site, for instance. Afterward, you need to select your audience. They have a variety of options to choose from such as location, age, relationship, work, ethnic affinity, generation, interests, behaviors, and connections, to name a few. You are even able to create either a custom audience, which is one with people that have already interacted with your company, or a lookalike audience, which is one that is very similar to your company’s most valuable audience. Facebook lets you know how specific your audience is via their audience definition gauge. It even lets you know the estimate reach number of your ad. The next step requires establishing a placement. However, for Instagram advertising, that step is easy as you just have to check the box for Instagram. The following step, though, is a bit more complex as it involves setting your budget. Just as advertising on Facebook, it’s convenient on Instagram, too as you get to set your own budget. In fact, you are able to set one of two budgets. A daily budget entails setting the amount that you are willing to pay on a daily basis for an ad while setting a lifetime budget specifies that amount that you’re willing to pay during the lifetime of an ad. However, when it comes to the budget, you also have to set your schedule, which is what you choose when you would like your campaign to begin and end running. You can even set parameters that way your ad only runs during certain hours of the day, for instance. You also need to set your optimization for ad delivery via one of three options. By setting link clicks, your ads are delivered in order to get the most clicks to your site at the lowest price. With impressions, your ads are delivered as much as possible. Lastly, the daily unique reach is delivered to people once a day. Then, you set your bid amount, which actually determines how effectively your ad ends up being delivered. You can choose between manual or automatic. The last thing that you need to set is your delivery schedule which you have two options to choose from. The standard one shows your ad all throughout the day while the accelerated ones assists you with reaching an audience very fast which is great for time-sensitive ads.

Now’s the time to create your ad. You can choose between a single image or video or several images in one ad. When it comes to images, they need to either be .jpeg or .png and you shouldn’t be too wordy in your caption. The size of a video, on the other hand, is suggested to be 1200 x 628 pixels.

One of the most important parts, though, is remembering to connect your Facebook page to your Instagram account. Also, don’t forget to add the site URL that you’re trying to push more traffic to. It’s also highly beneficial to choose a CTA button, such as “apply now” or “sign up”, for instance. As soon as you’ve placed your order and the ad has launched, analyze the performance that way you can make any changes, should they be necessary, in order to completely optimize your ad.

The thing is, there are a lot of different metrics to track which could get very confusing and time-consuming in the long run. Additionally, there are various nuances that you won’t have the tools for to overcome such as bots that’ll eat up your ad budget or to track user engagement as soon as they’ve left the platform. However, with a solution such as our own, we can do all of that for you and more with the help of all of our tools. TEA, which stands for threat and engagement analytics, assist users with measuring site traffic and visitor engagement, tracking marketing campaigns, targeting actual users with the relevant ads, as well as guaranteeing that all of the gathered data is related to actual users instead of bots. We have a free webinar on our site if you are interested in learning more.