The Cost of Instagram Paid Advertising and How to Lower It

When trying to advertise on Instagram, you can do so without paying anything via direct messages, posts, stories, or boomerangs, for instance. These have all proven to be effective ways to engage with your audience. However, these free options only go so far. Therefore, once you’ve made the most out of advertising for free, it’s time to turn to Instagram paid advertising, which is a very powerful marketing tool. Instagram ads provide you with advanced targeting and a lot of flexibility, that way they can cater to virtually any type of business.

The beauty of advertising on Instagram is the fact that you don’t even need an account to do so. This is due to the fact that Facebook is actually the parent company of Instagram, therefore all things ad related actually happen in Facebook’s Ads Manager. That being said, it is often recommended to have a profile as it will give you an idea of how your target audience behaves. You would just need to link that profile to a Facebook business page. At this point, you’re probably wondering, “Why advertise on Instagram when you can on Facebook?” The thing is, both of the platforms are great as they boast a huge user audience. Facebook does have the greatest with over two billion, but Instagram has the highest user engagement rate. In fact, users click on Instagram ads about 2.5 more times than any other social media site. So, advertising on Instagram assists businesses with getting their item or service out to the public, but at what cost?

How Much Does It Cost to Advertise on Instagram?

This question comes with a tricky answer as it truly depends on a number of factors such as the industry that you’re in or the audience that you’re targeting. That being said, on average, advertising on Instagram is more expensive than say, on Twitter or on Facebook. However, this only due to the fact that the click-through-rate is so impressive. Therefore, regardless of the amount that you pay, there’s a huge chance to make major conversions in return. However, to give you a reference point, on average, the CPM, or cost-per-thousand views, is around $6.70. That being said, there are a number of things that you can do in order to lower that price. For starters, begin by strategizing. Much like with anything in life, you won’t go far unless you have a solid plan. You may have to try several, though, to figure out what works and what doesn’t.

Another way to lower your Instagram advertising costs is by making sure that the content you create is quality and relevant to your target audience. The thing is, Instagram utilizes a relevance score in order to rank the relevance of the ads on the platform. As a result, the more relevant your ad is, the lower your costs will end up being. On the other hand, should your ad not be relevant, then you can expect your costs to be higher. This relevancy score moves up and down depending on how users interact with it. If you get a lot of positive interactions such as likes and clicks, for instance, then your score will increase. However, if people hide your ad then your relevancy score will decrease.

In addition, you should make sure that you take advantage of all of the targeting options that the Ad’s Manager provides you with. That’s one of the hallmarks of the solution. The thing is, you want to narrow down your audience to the T because the more people that you show your audience to, the greater the chance that the majority won’t convert. On the other hand, though, if your ad is only shown to those who are really interested in your item or service, then you’ll see maximum conversions. The Ads Manager makes it really easy for you to narrow down your audience as much as possible via easy options such as age, gender, and location and then by taking it up a notch with options such as interests, behaviors, and connections. They even provide you with a gauge that will let you know whether or not your ad is narrow enough.

Also, don’t hesitate to test out various options of a certain ad via A/B testing. This is a great way to figure out which ad elements are the most relevant to your target audience. Here, you make two ads that resemble one another but differ solely based on one thing. After both are live, monitor how each is doing and then choose the one that does the best.

Last, but not least, though, it’s important that you don’t forget to track how your ad campaign is doing after it’s launched. A few of the minor pieces can be tracked with the Ads Manager analytics feature, but otherwise, you will need to enlist an agency like our own to help you out with tracking user engagement outside of the platform as well as detect any threats such as bots that were made to eat away your advertising budget.

TEA

TEA is a threat and engagement agency that assists users with measuring both site traffic and visitor engagement with the help of a variety of tools. For instance, our engagement trends analysis technology allows you to identify any visitor behavior trends and even figure out the actual conversion rate for your site. Our remarketing segmentation tools let users target actual potential customers with the right ads that are relevant. In addition, our campaign management tools let you track your marketing campaigns, which gives you insight into actual visitor activity. On top of that, both our automated click fraud protection and engagement fraud protection makes sure that all of the engagement data that’s gathered is related to actual visitors instead of those human-like bots that we had mentioned earlier. If you are interested in learning everything else that we can do for you, head on over to our site where you can watch a free webinar.